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Singh said these are informal experiments to gather preliminary data that could be used in writing a proposal. "We want to make sure we don't oversell the technol- ogy," he said. "We want to make sure when we come out there that people think it's credible. We've taken a pretty conservative approach to this." Once a project is launched, he thinks it could take three to five years to develop a system with the right accuracy, speed, and price. Vision Robotics One of the important aspects of a harvesting system is the ability to locate the apples on the trees. Six years ago, Vision Robotics of San Diego, California, began a project to develop a robotic apple harvester. Other manufacturers who had attempted robotic har- vesting had run into problems with end effectors that tried to locate fruit as they picked it. Vision Robotics took a two-step approach. One robot would act as a scout, develop a three-dimensional map of the fruit and inter- fering branches, and work out a picking strategy for a separate machine that would come along later and pick the fruit. The Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission pro- Sanjiv Singh is leading a multistate project on automation research. vided $283,000 initially to Vision Robotics to develop the orchard scout, while the California Citrus Research Board paid a similar amount to the company to develop a citrus scout. Vision Robotics was never able to secure funding to develop the harvesting part of the system, but saw potential for the scout as a crop estimating and yield mapping tool. When the CASC program began, Vision Robotics became a collaborator. Carnegie "The gee-whiz factor runs cold Mellon's Robotics Institute has since taken over the scout project. Singh said they are working on making it more compact and lighter so it would be cheaper and easier to pull with a tractor. They have also integrated the scout with an autonomous orchard vehicle that they've developed. The university is looking for a partner to commercialize it. Tony Koselka, founder and chief operating officer of pretty quickly." —Sanjiv Singh Vision Robotics, said his company is still interested in developing a robotic harvester, but it would be an expen- sive project that would be best tackled by a consortium because various scientists around the country are making progress on different aspects of it. It would be a multi - million-dollar project. He believes it is technologically feasible, and perhaps even cost effective, but he thinks it would be difficult. Manipulating the apples without damaging them is the hardest part. Apples can't just be plucked from the tree. It's challenging to have a machine grab apples from a variety of different angles and replicate the way a human lifts and turns them to detach them from the tree. The project would be easier if all the orchards had formal training systems where all the fruit was visible and hanging vertically, he said. The scout would be 100 percent accu- rate, and the harvester could have shorter arms and could pick all the fruit from the same orientation. Having a scout to map the fruit before harvesting might not be necessary in orchards where all the fruit is immediately visible, but a scout would make it more efficient, Koselka said. "The biggest factor is how fast you can get the fruit off the tree. If the scout gets you 25 percent more efficiency, that's enough to pay for the cost of it." Initially, a robotic harvesting system might not save growers money, but it would reduce their labor needs. Koselka said the economics are less favorable in apples than in citrus, however, because citrus is harvested for ten months of the year versus a few weeks for apples. Machines for apple harvesting might need to be multipurpose so they can be used for other jobs such as pruning, he said. Vision Robotics has developed a robotic pruner for grapevines, which should be commercialized within the next two years. • WSU engineer Manoj Karkee is designing an over-the-row crop estimating system. capture images of both sides of the trees, which allows better identification of apples than when images are taken from only one side. The sensor records where the camera is oriented so that a 3D map of the fruit can be created. Mapping fruit in 3D should help eliminate duplicate fruit counts and improve the accuracy of the crop estimate, which can be made on a block-by-block basis, Karkee reports. The system should be able to identify an apple that is 10 millimeter (3/8 inch) or larger. Karkee, who will receive $34,402 in funding from the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission for the project this year, plans to redesign the platform to make it lighter and easier to operate and to include lighting so it can operate at night. He will also investi- gate blowing air onto the trees to move the leaves and improve the ability to detect fruit. Karkee is also exploring the use of 3D cameras in an automatic pruning system for apples with the aim of reducing the manual labor needed for pruning. The system would employ machine vision to identify where on the trees cuts should be made. In tests, the system was able to do that with 90 percent accuracy. —G. Warner D CROP estimatingproject r. Manoj Karkee, engineer at Washington State University's Center for Precision and Auto- mated Agricultural Systems, is working on a machine-vision system to improve apple crop esti- mating. He has designed an over-the-row platform to carry a color camera, a three-dimensional camera, and an orientation sensor along apple rows. When he tested the system in an orchard of Allan Brothers, Inc., in Prosser, Washington, he was able to 8 AUGUST 2012 GOOD FRUIT GROWER www.goodfruit.com