In China, Uni-orange Design, an integrated industrial design solutions provider, unveiled a semi-automatic operations platform for orchards. Relatively small, the modular, robotic platform can handle most spherical fruits with up to eight people standing on the platform.
Aaron Cui, COO of Uni-orange Design commented, “It is quite common around the world that most spherical fruits are harvested by hand, which is extremely labor-consuming and the efficiency is low. Some countries with advanced agriculture are using fruit harvesting platforms to help pickers. However, these machines are usually so big in size that they are not suitable for a lot of the landscapes of orchards and prices are usually high.”
The average hourly production volume from each picker is 300kg, a five times increase in productivity compared with conventional harvesting methods. The machine can walk on a variety of landscapes such as highland and hill areas and the walking speed is controllable.