Robot fruit pickers make life sweeter for struggling farmers

And they provide the farmer with invaluable data – real-time updates on harvesting progress, time to completion, quantity picked and cost.

Tevel Aerobotics, a startup based in Tel Nof, central Israel, has developed the world’s only flying autonomous robots (FARs) that pick fruit.

There are other robot solutions for fruit picking, but they are big ground-based machines that aren’t as agile, efficient or cost-effective.

The FARs may look like drones to you and me, but technically they're not, because they're tethered to a power source.

Tevel deploys dozens of its FARs across an entire orchard – either four or eight tethered to a mobile platform – during the small time-window when a crop is ready to harvest.

Its robots are currently operating in Italy, Chile and the United States, as well as Israel.

“Finding fruit pickers is every farmer’s biggest concern,” said Yaniv Maor, the company’s founder and CEO.

“Ask any farmer, anywhere in the world and they’ll tell you they don’t have the people."

Sweet success (credit Tevel)[Missing Credit]

In many cases fruit is left to the rot on the tree because there is simply nobody available to pick it.

The Tevel robots aren’t yet as fast as human pickers. They can currently manage about a ton, half as much as a person.

But they are happy to work three shifts a day, and as the technology evolves, they will speed up.

“We’re not a substitute for labour, we are a solution for the labour shortage,” said Maor.

“In the future fewer people will work in picking and more will work managing the robots, analysing the data and making decisions.”

Teaching them exactly how to pick a fruit is a complex task.

“We have to teach the robot about each fruit, about the foliage, the branches, the leaves, how to access the fruit, how to rotate it and disconnect it from the tree,” said Maor.