Palm Oil Agriculture

 An example of complex and labor intensive agricultural  harvesting

Home/News/'Intelligent' Cutters for Trees to Ease Malaysia Palm..

ACM TECHNEWS, 'Intelligent' Cutters for Trees to Ease Malaysia Palm Oil Labor Crunch

'Intelligent' Cutters for Trees to Ease Malaysia Palm Oil Labor Crunch

By Bloomberg, December 21, 2021

Automation in the palm oil industry has been slow in part due to the sectors difficult and dangerous conditions.

IRGA, a precision farming solutions provider in Malaysia, has developed a palm oil harvesting tool that could help the industry manage a chronic labor shortage., The intelligent palm tree cutter, called HARVi, relies on digital sensors to identify the location of the worker and the tree and determine whether the worker is cutting fruit or pruning fronds.

A mobile app makes the data easily accessible and eliminates the need to manually count fruit bunches.

Said IRGA's Girish Ramachandran, "From the tree to the mill there is very, very low digitalization. People are still running manual processes that are absurd."

The industry's grueling conditions, with fruit growing as high as 40 feet off the ground in bunches that weight up to 55 pounds, has posed a challenge for automation. With HARVi, workers can harvest fruit bunches up to 20 feet high, versus 12 to 14 feet currently.

From Bloomberg

View Full Article  

Wheat Harvesting Ag Tech

Impressive effort for autonomous driving and harvesting Agriculture tech

In IEEE Spectrum 

AN ARMY OF GRAIN-HARVESTING ROBOTS MARCHES ACROSS RUSSIA

Aftermarket AIs drive combines

 By OLGA USKOVA 25 AUG 2021  via IEEE Spectrum

Russia is the world's largest wheat exporter, with 20 percent of the world's wheat trade. Combine harvesters that can drive themselves using technology from Russian company Cognitive Pilot are helping to make the harvesting process faster and more efficient.

COGNITIVE PILOT

The field of automated precision agriculture is based on one concept—autonomous driving technologies that guide vehicles through GPS navigation. Fifteen years ago, when high-accuracy GPS became available for civilian use, farmers thought things would be simple: Put a GPS receiver station at the edge of the field, configure a route for a tractor or a combine harvester, and off you go, dear robot!

Practice has shown, however, that this kind of carefree field cultivation is inefficient and dangerous. It works only in ideal fields, which are almost never encountered in real life. If there's a log or a rock in the field, or a couple of village paramours dozing in the rye under the sun, the tractor will run right over them. And not all countries have reliable satellite coverage—in agricultural markets like Kazakhstan, coverage can be unstable. This is why, if you want safe and efficient farming, you need to equip your vehicle with sensors and an artificial intelligence that can see and understand its surroundings instead of blindly following GPS navigation instructions.  .... '