HERE WE GO
Robotic gripper could offer a helping hand in the apple orchard
The robotic gripper wasn’t working; its “fingers” were too short and stiff to gently pick the apples off the trees.
Chris Ninatanta, a first-year PhD student in mechanical engineering at Washington State University, knew who to consult. His parents had picked apples, cherries and pears in Washington orchards his whole life.
“One day I asked them for a recording of how they pick an apple,” Ninatanta says. “It’s nice to have a reference to how something should work.”
It was the inspiration he needed. Tests in an orchard in Prosser, Washington, showed that the softer silicone fingers of the new robotic gripper were able to harvest about 87% of apples without damaging them.
Now Ninatanta and fellow PhD student Ryan Dorosh are working on a fully autonomous apple-picking robot that incorporates the gripper mechanism. Both are part of the Mechanically Intelligent Autonomous Robotics (MIAR) Laboratory at WSU, led by Flaherty Assistant Professor Ming Luo of the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. The work is funded by the Washington State Tree Fruit Research Commission.
The gripper mechanism is mostly 3-D printed and is cable-driven, choices that make it simple to operate and inexpensive to make. Another important feature: the autonomous robot is specifically designed to work around people.
He sees potential for robots to someday – maybe in as little as a decade – fill in gaps where there are labor shortages in orchards. Robots also could make apple-picking safer for farmworkers, by harvesting on days when there’s too much wildfire smoke to be outside, or it’s too hot.
Ninatanta sometimes picked cherries and apples with his parents growing up in Wapato, Washington, so it’s not surprising that his scientific interests include apples. He says agricultural robotics is probably his career path since it’s a fast-growing field. He’s part of the National Science Foundation’s next-generation robotics training program at WSU, which includes more than 50 graduate students who are researching and designing robotic solutions to workforce challenges.
We want it to work in collaboration with orchard apple pickers, not replace them.
Chris Ninatanta
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