Down a dusty road west of Napier, a screeching robot makes the sound of a world-first commercial apple picking robot, operating in a T&G Global apple orchard. The robot could have major ramifications for New Zealand's fruit-picking industry, which nearly every year in recent memory has experienced a seasonal labour shortage, to the dismay of growers.
Gary Wellwood, T&G's global innovation manager, said the company met Silicon Valley-based Abundant Robotics two years ago when they were trialling a prototype in Australia. Wellwood said T&G representatives realised "this is going to happen", and that every apple tree planted now would be visited by a robot "in some form" - whether that was a harvest robot, counting and sizing robot, or pruning robot.
"We understood that a robot can't work in a fully three-dimensional tree [orchard], this is why we've gone to [two-dimensional]."
An orchard in Hawke's Bay, specifically planted for the final iteration of the robot, was now fully operational.
Dan Steere, chief executive of Abundant Robotics, said it was the first time in the world the robot had been used commercially: "The reason it's been so hard in the past is because you've got delicate fruit, and if you're trying to harvest that you can't damage the fruit, you don't want to damage the trees ... technically it's really challenging."
New Zealand Apples & Pears chief executive Alan Pollard said it was the perfect example of the industry using technology to enhance its future. But a harvest being completely done by robots was still a long time away.
Source: stuff.co.nz
