The future of fruit farming

Facilitations and benefits in the use of harvesters, robots, autonomous vehicles and ripeness sensors during the fruit and vegetables harvesting. 

The main problem for fruit growers is the shortage of qualified workers to pick fruit. Growing need to automate other work in orchards. This entails the development of the so-called agrorobotics.

Although some fruit growers and orchard advisors do not believe that robots can work effectively during harvesting, robotics engineers are unanimous. In their opinion, the use of robots for large-scale orchard work is only a matter of time.

Currently, robots are used in field work in agriculture, some are mass-produced and available on the market. Start-ups producing robots for orchards carry out advanced research and implementation work. In various places around the world, autonomous, self-propelled structures are used for inter-row work and for the chemical protection of orchards. Some start-ups have developed models of robots for fruit harvesting in orchards, which could be used here as well.

Adam Ekielski from the Warsaw University of Life Sciences will talk about combine harvesters and automatic harvesting machines for fruit and vegetables, sensors for checking their ripeness and those used for selective fruit harvesting, as well as remote crop monitoring systems, i.e. the Internet of Things. He will present the design solutions used in combine harvesters for harvesting soft fruit, taking into account the limitation of their damage and the extension of the storage time of the harvested fruit. by shock cooling. He will discuss sensors: contact (piezzo, pressure, pneumatic, hydraulic) and contactless (optical, photodetectors), image analysis, and contactless multispectral systems (reflective and transparent (X-ray)), WLAN information transfer systems, GSM and RFID identification systems.

 A detailed program of the Machinery Conference will be available soon at https://tsw.pl/a/agenda