Robotic Fruit Tree Harvester

ended

Fresh fruit tree growers worldwide are increasingly burdened by the scarcity of human labour, rising labour costs, and overall production costs. This phenomenon is becoming more acute in light of regulatory restrictions, as well as constraints on import and temporary employment from less developed countries. Moreover, human pickers inadvertently bruise some of the fruit picked during the picking process. The result is loss of yield and profit to the fruit grower by up to 30%. The need for automation in agriculture in general and in fresh fruit harvesting in particular has never been greater and we intend to tap into this market with the launch of the FFRobot. We anticipate a market penetration rate of 3% of the TAM, amounting to potential annual revenues of €240M. The FFRobot is a revolutionary multi-arm fruit harvesting robot with specially developed computerized vision, image processing software and dedicated algorithms. The FFRobot can move automatically amongst the orchard rows and pick apples and a variety of different fresh fruit by emulating the human hand movement, all without human touch! In the last submission we received a Seal of Excellence and a score of 13.88! We have since then reached a significant operational milestone. Our main objective for this Phase 2 project is to bridge the gap from TRL 7 to full commercialisation of the FFRobot. To achieve this, activities for this project will centre on: demonstrating the operative functionality of the multi-arm FFRobot (including field trial tests); improving the cost effectiveness of the FFRobot; identifying and signing agreements with commercialisation partners; and devising a viable short and long-term commercialisation and scale-up plan. FFRobotics was founded in 2014 by Avi Kahani (CEO), with the vision of disrupting the fresh fruit harvesting market by automating the fruit picking process from end-to-end. It is AgTech at its best, combining computer vision and robotics.