Harvesting Fruits Using a Mobile Platform: A Case Study Applied to Citrus

Abstract

Harvesting fruits and vegetables has been a challenge. Mobile platforms for harvesting vegetables and fruits have been used, but with some limitations, such as their applicability for a certain time of the year and for a specific crop. A mobile platform was initially developed for harvesting fresh market tomatoes, mainly staked in Brazil. However, after field trials, many problems were identified, such as crop use limitation and machine structure problems. Therefore, the initial project was reformulated to assume different functions, with a retractable and smaller frame and the possibility of adding on other devices, expanding crop harvest and farm use. The concept of a hybrid vehicle with one electric power generator to drive all four wheels with electric motors was kept. The main goal of this article is to describe the development of the mobile platform machine structural details and integration of electrical, hydraulic, and mechanical project and field tests performed in a commercial orange orchard, comparing harvest types, evaluating yield and machine performance. Tests with the mobile laboratory prototype show its potential application to assist harvest and to other farm operations, especially due to its mobility. Harvest productivity through machine was higher, though not significantly different from manual harvest.

Rootstocks Genotypes Impact on Tree Development and Industrial Properties of ‘Valencia’ Sweet Orange Juice

“…Mechanical harvesting is increasingly being proposed as a solution, and has been implemented in several countries, with new models of orange harvesters being developed and made available on the market. It is likely that this practice, which aims to optimize harvesting and minimize production costs by reducing labor, represents the future of the citrus industry [43][44][45]. Establishing new orchards with orange trees grafted on dwarfing rootstocks, as observed in our trial, can favor mechanical harvesting, because the reduced canopy expansion between rows allows for more efficient traffic of large machines and other agricultural machinery, facilitates harvesting and avoids damage to the trees and to the fruits.…”

“…Further, highly vigorous trees require more manual labor to harvest, because it is difficult to collect fruit from higher in the canopy, often requiring the use of ladders and harvesting hooks; this reduces the operating yield of orange pickers [22,43]. Mechanical harvesting is increasingly being proposed as a solution, and has been implemented in several countries, with new models of orange harvesters being developed and made available on the market.…”

Development of a sweet pepper harvesting robot

“…Currently reported attempts of fully integrated autonomous harvesting include melon (Edan, Rogozin, Flash, & Miles, 2000), cucumber (van Henten et al, 2002(van Henten et al, , 2003, strawberry (Hayashi et al, 2010), cherry tomato (Feng, Zou, Fan, Zhang, & Wang, 2018;Tanigaki, Fujiura, Akase, & Imagawa, 2008), eggplant (Hayashi, Ganno, Ishii, & Tanaka, 2002), apple (De-An, Jidong, Wei, Ying, & Yu, 2011;Silwal et al, 2017;Yuan, Lei, Xin, & Bing, 2016), orange (Almendral et al, 2018;Ferreira, Sanchez, Braunbeck, & Santos, 2018), and sweet peppers harvesting (Bac et al, 2017;Lehnert, English, McCool, Tow, & Perez, 2017). However, most research to date has been has been tested either in simulation (Edan & Miles, 1993;Shamshiri et al, 2018;Wang et al, 2018) or in laboratory conditions (Almendral et al, 2018;Ceres, Pons, Jimenez, Martin, & Calderon, 1998;Foglia & Reina, 2006).…”

Integrated Harvest and Farm-to-Door Distribution Scheduling with Postharvest Quality Deterioration for Vegetable Online Retailing

“…An and Ouyang [28] proposed the relationship between harvest time and quality decay in an uncertain environment to reduce the postharvest loss and transportation cost. Ferreira et al [29] and Takeda et al [30] studied the harvest scheduling of fresh fruits and vegetables through machines to increase harvest efficiencies, such as the semi-mechanical system and the mobile platform machine. Ceccarelli et al [31] discussed the relationship between the harvest maturity stage and cold storage time.…”