Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
FIGURE 7.18
Picker Technologies and Oxbo developed Apple Harvester. (From Warner,
G., Next-generation harvester: the harvesting and sorting system in nearing commercial
release, 2010. With permission.)
off of to improve labor productivity, as shown in Figure 7.17a, or as complicated as
the platform in Figure 7.17b, having some combination of automation technologies
such as autosteer, fruit sorting, and containerizing (Hansen, 2011).
Picker Technologies LLC and Oxbo International formed a partnership to develop
and commercialize fruit harvesting, scanning, and sorting technologies for fresh
market apples (Warner, 2010; Figure 7.18). Their apple harvester improves harvest
efficiency by eliminating the need for ladders. Pickers place apples into vacuum
tubes that transport the fruit up to the machine's platform, where fruit is scanned and
culls are separated so that only the good fruit goes to the warehouse. Four workers
are needed for each harvester, with one of them serving as a driver and harvester.
The harvester is designed to handle 100 apples/min per worker, with reduced worker
fatigue since they no longer use bags and ladders.
7.3.7 Y
IELD
M
ONITORING
Yield monitoring systems have been developing over the past couple of decades
applying new techniques to document and respond to the spatial variability of crops
(Whitney, Miller et al., 1999). Yield maps, results of yield monitoring systems, have
provided growers essential information for spatial analysis and evaluation of crop
production management at a within-field level. Yield monitoring systems can be
divided into two main categories by their mass flow sensing techniques: indirect
method based on machine vision techniques and direct method based on weighing
techniques. The visio-based yield monitoring technique can be attractive not only for
measuring mass flow of production but also for monitoring fruit quality, screening
for problems with diseases, maturities, etc. However, the challenges of recognizing
