<p style="text-indent:0px; line-height:12px;"><span style="font-weight:bold;line-height:130%"> Alva, Florida</span><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">By ANUK Staff<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">4.8.13</p><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><p>Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Energid Technologies Corp is testing a prototype for a robotic citrus harvester in Alva, Florida.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Chief Technology Officer James English and colleague Chu-Yin Chang have spent the past several days testing the prototype to help growers reduce harvesting costs, according to NewsPress.com.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><img src="https://cdn.andnowuknow.com/legacyWriterImages/citrusrobot040813body1.jpg" alt="images040813" /><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">“We do a lot of work in robotic control, simulations and machine vision,” English said, naming such clients as NASA and the National Science Foundation. “We want to apply that technology to citrus harvesting.”<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">The harvester prototype uses a grid of pneumatic frog-tongue-like picking mechanisms. Multiple color cameras and computer vision technology target the fruit. The mechanisms knock individual pieces to the ground.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Other traditional forms of mechanical harvesting haven’t consistently attained that level of accuracy, English added.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Labor cost and availability are big concerns for Florida citrus growers, said Fritz Roka, an economist with the Southwest Florida Research and Education Center in Immokalee.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">But after 50 years of experimentation and some commercial use, mechanical citrus harvesting has yet to catch hold, Roka said.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">That’s less than 2 percent of the crop, and a decline from four years earlier, when machines picked roughly 7 percent of the crop. In the 2011-2012 season, only 9,400 acres of citrus statewide were harvested mechanically.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Growers long have fretted that mechanical harvesting could harm trees and their yield, Roka said. With the invasion of the citrus greening, a bacterial outbreak that enfeebles trees, growers are leery of harvesters that use brute force.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">Cost of mechanical harvesting also could be a challenge, Roka said. In 2004, the average cost of raising an acre of citrus to maturity was $800. Now, as growers put more into tree nutrition and battling the tiny insect that carries greening, per acre costs are $1,700 and higher.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">If the next-generation of mechanical picker isn’t cheap to use, “it’s got to be really, really efficient,” Roka said.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">English thinks his final product will fit the bill: “One operator should be able to remove 10 tons of fruit per hour,” English said, noting “our goal is to pick at least 96 percent of the fruit.”<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">The biggest challenge “is economic,” English said. “For any system to compete with hand harvesting, it has to be able to pick fruit for less than half a cent – per fruit.”<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">The next step is to look for funding to make a prototype with more “frog’s tongues,” better vision and other market-friendly enhancements, English said. Two U.S. agriculture department grants totaling $480,000 have aided in research and development thus far.<hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding"><a class="btn btn-sm btn-primary col-lg-12" style="white-space: normal;" href=" http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2013304080002&nclick_check=1" target="_new">Citrus Robot</a></p><hr class="legacyRuler"><hr class="invisible minimal-padding">
