3 accepted papers
Tree fruit growers around the world are facing labor shortages for critical operations, including harvest and pruning. There is a great interest in developing robotic solutions for these labor-intensive tasks, but current efforts have been prohibitively costly, slow, or require a reconfiguration of…
Dormant pruning is a major cost component of fresh market tree fruit production, nearly equal in scale to harvesting the fruit. However, relatively little focus has been given to the problem of pruning trees autonomously. In this paper, we introduce a robotic system consisting of an industrial manip…
There are no mechanical harvesters for the fresh market apple industry commercially available. The absence of automated harvesting technology is a critical problem because of rising production costs and increasing uncertainty about future labor availability. This paper presents the preliminary desig…