Tevel's Flying Autonomous Robots (FAR), which allows the automated harvesting of fruits, has already made its debut in Chile.
The tests, the first of their kind in South America, were carried out in the Santa Elena field of Unifrutti by a team of specialists from Italy and Israel. “We traveled here,” says Simone Pollano, general manager of Tevel operations for Europe, “because we must fine-tune all the robot's factors before entering the commercial level, soon. Our goal is to have a drone that can do the job of a person in the field. A machine of this kind would be as same productive as eight workers.”
The Israeli company Tevel uses a harvesting platform from Darwin Harvesting Group that is fed by drones that are capable of identifying the place where the fruits are, selecting the ones that are ripe enough to harvest, harvesting them, and carefully depositing them on the platform to avoid damage.
“All market leaders, such as Unifrutti, are having issues due to low labor availability. They look to the future, they understand that if they don't have harvesters there will be no business,” stated Yaniv Maor, founder, and CEO of Tevel.
“Drone technology is infinitely more economical than mechanical arms,” stated Simone Pollano. The largest investment this system requires is the platform where the fruit is deposited. However, it's no different from the platforms that people use nowadays; drones are a third of its cost. We want to guarantee the system only costs what producers are currently paying for labor, with the great advantage of not having to worry about finding enough people every year or having time to train them, among other things. I honestly believe drones are starting to be a commodity, and they will probably follow the same trend as mobile phones. They'll be increasingly cheaper, with greater computational capacity, more accurate, lighter, with superior satellite data transmission. I'm sure that in the future this part of the work will cost less.”
Source: redagricola.com