Sophisticated drones are harvesting crops with a precision unprecedented in farming.
A new approach to harvesting fruit is taking wing. In California, Washington state, and Chile, flying robots from Tevel are picking apples, peaches, nectarines, apricots, plums, pears, and citrus fruits. Not only are they plucking the fruit, the AI technology embedded in the drones are providing farmers valuable insights in real-time.
The drone-pickers provide farmers with information on the total amount of fruit picked, the weight and size of each fruit, color grading, disease detection, timestamps, geolocation, and the distribution of weight, size & colors in the bin. Perhaps better still, unlike human pickers, Tevel’s drones never fatigue.
Using machine vision and multispectral analysis, these intelligent harvesters identify ripeness, sugar content, and diseases—before a single fruit is picked. Drone-pickers can harvest fruit 24/7. They are programmed to only pick the best-quality fruits; the issue of labor shortages are poised to be a thing of the past; and because human hands never touch the fruit, food safety is enhanced.
In countries where finding labor to pick the harvest can be challenging and transporting them from their homes to the farm or orchard and back, fruit-picking drones permanently eliminate the problem. The farmers benefit and consumers benefit from predictable, safe, less expensive produce.
Keywords: #AI Today, #AI, #agriculture, #farming, #harvesting, #machine vision, #drones
Top 3 Takeaways
- AI has made its way into agriculture
- Tevel has developed an AI-powered drone to harvest fruit
- Tevel’s new harvester can help farmers overcome labor shortages come harvest time.
