Grant to help NNU professor develop fruit-harvesting robot

Duke Bulanon, Northwest Nazarene University engineering professor, describes the concept of a fruit harvesting robot as having been around for decades, but now he and several undergraduate students have technology and funding to, hopefully, make it happen.

Bulanon and his team received $131,784 from the Idaho State Department of Agriculture to develop a prototype of a robotic arm to pick orchard fruit, and Bulanon hopes to start in local apple orchards near this harvest season, doing a demo in September then doing harvest tests in October.

“The challenge is finding the fruit, then commanding the robot to get toward the fruit, and picking it without damaging it,” Bulanon said. “Right now we’re trying to program the robot to do some motions, such as moving from one point to another. One of our challenges right now is speed; we are also studying how to recognize an object, or we could command the robot to move to that particular object.”

Bulanon offers a demonstration: A plastic, white, bendable robotic arm, called the OrBot, inches toward an abiotic tree on one of the classroom tables, extends, then, using its claw-like “hand,” pulls on the fake apple tapped to the tree. The pressure will have to be adjusted, so as not to bruise the fruit, and the arm is supposed to twist when it pulls, ensuring a stem is kept on the apple, which, Bulanon said, will increase its shelf life.

Bulanon has multiple sizes of plastic apples; later, the intention is to practice with real fruit, possibly purchased from a grocery store. Variables from fruit color to sizing and disbursement of fruit within the tree all present challenges.

Undergraduate Colton Burr’s job is to design a system to get the robot to an orchard, and to make sure it can move and pick an apple. Marina DeVlieg is currently working on the image processing, or what the robot “sees.”

Advancement in technology, such as improved sensors, and the price of robots going down, is making it more viable for farmers to incorporate, Bulanon said, and some farmers in the Treasure Valley could use this technology to address a shortage of agriculture workers for seasonal jobs like harvesting.

This is something Symms Fruit Ranch has experienced. The orchard is currently working through the H-2A program, said Jamie Mertz, partner at Symms Fruit Ranch in Caldwell, which helps connect migrant workers from various countries to agriculture jobs in the U.S. Symms Fruit Ranch not only has to pay labor costs, but lodging and the worker’s transportation as well.

“That’s why we are trying to find ways of helping with the labor cost,” Mertz said.

Neither Mertz nor Bulanon foresee robotic agriculture technology replacing human workers in the near future; rather, both see the two working together.

“I think that’s more realistic,” Mertz said.

“My hope is not to eliminate humans (on) the farm, because I think the human touch is still very important,” Bulanon said. “My goal is to have humans and robots working in harmony.”

With this technology, harvesting can be done more quickly, as the robot and a shift of workers could work at night.

The robot is also intended to reduce the intense physicality of manual labor. Currently, Symms Fruit Ranch has an automated platform that assists workers with harvesting, elevating workers, and their baskets, up toward the fruit. This way, workers don’t have to carry around a ladder and walk from tree to tree, nor do they have to carry around their fruit baskets, as the platform will lower full baskets to the ground.

Symms Fruit Ranch is one of the locations where Bulanon intends to practice using the robot fruit picking arm. Recently, Symms Fruit Ranch has been working to shape its orchards in a way that is ideal for efficient picking, including, potentially, for robots.

“I think it’s beneficial for industry in general, and (this) company, to try to be on the front end of some of these things,” Mertz said. “It’s just getting these things to where we can use them.”

Bulanon intends to not only ensure the robotic arm can pick apples, but perhaps other fruit, such as peaches. And, in the off-season, the hope is to have the robot be capable of performing other tasks, such as spraying or pruning.

As the technology for automated agriculture work nears becoming more cost-effective for farmers, Mertz and Bulanon hope this will help attract younger generations to the industry, such as it did for Burr, who grew up in Weiser, a “very agriculturally based town.”

“I’ve been around agriculture my whole life; I think this is a big step forward because I know personally in Idaho not a lot of farmers can even look toward this kind of technology to help them,” Burr said. “I want to be somewhere in the ag industry just because I think it’s so important to be developing in the industry.”