Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partnership with India’s Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd.‘s farm equipment division will develop grape-picking robots. Known as the Mahindra AgTech Center, the facility will complement the ongoing work in product development centers at Mahindra Research Valley in India, Japan, and Finland to create a new generation of equipment to help farmers globally.
Tomonari “Tomo” Furukawa, a professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech said, “India is the second-largest producer in the world in tabletop grapes. There are many countries that produce grapes for wine and juice, but wine and juice and tabletop grapes are very different.” Picking tabletop grapes manually is very labor-intensive and since each person has different visual criteria for harvesting, the quality cannot be maintained. “That [quality control] brings up the idea of robotic harvesting, which replaces the human harvesters,” Furukawa said. “Robots will prevent damage to the grapes because they will appropriately use sensors to pick grapes, causing minimal damage,” he added.
Furukawa and his team will use techniques such as machine learning, advanced robotic vision to identify grapes in a three-dimensional environment, among others, so that quality control will be consistent.
