A great deal of what we do is research and the benefits from research are great! To the left, is an area of the project that involves several graduate students, Penn State Extension faculty and Carnegie Mellon faculty trying to find methods and builds that will keep apples singular from the tree to the table. Bill Messner explains the challenges during a field day in Biglerville, PA to folks from Washington State University and Carnegie Mellon.

Among the harvest assist technologies are automated platforms. Tara Baugher held a field day to introduce the N.Blosi, a harvest assist platform, to regional growers. The platform can be raised or lowered and can have a beltway for on-loading and off-loading of bins. It is motorized and the speed can be controlled just as with cruise control on a car.

 In addition to the obvious benefit of reducing injuries to workers and increasing harvest speed, the N.Blosi has the possibility to incorporate developing GIS positioning technology and steer through orchard rows; the added potential of bin filler technologies combined with platform technologies may move the apple from the worker’s hands to the table maintaining fruit quality.

The Autonomous Prime Mover navigates with laser positioning system developed under the direction of Dr. Sanjiv Singh at the Robotics Institute located at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. It is a robust system on a rugged body capable of towing various payloads. Ultimately, its system integration will allow for a complete build that will include various sensors such as NDVI, Hyperspectral Imaging, and Stereo Optics running algorithms that holistically sees and reports on every aspect of an orchard including receiving signals from pest traps for early detection. These new technologies may supply a future that CASC Project Manager, Marcel Bergerman, recently described:

Imagine a future where you wake up in the morning and a color-coded map of your orchard is shown on a touch-screen display. You sit in front of the screen with the coffee still hot and start querying the display for the status of several important conditions you need to monitor. What’s the moisture status in that pocket of thirty trees in zone 4 of block 21 that were water-stressed just last week? Are codling moths still trying to make an incursion into block 45, or has the automatic monitoring trap shown a decline in activity? And what about that one tree in block 12, the one bordering the game reserve, where yesterday the display alerted you to the possible onset of fire blight?  www.Growingproduce.com/americanfruitgrower/?storyid=2389