A robotic apple picking system is beginning to take shape. Scientists from Vision Robotics Corporation of San Diego, California, were in Washington State in October to test a prototype of what they call the “scout,” a machine that detects and maps the apples on the trees so that a robotic harvester will be able to pick them. The prototype scout has six pairs of cameras mounted on a vertical boom facing the trees, and the boom can be angled to suit the canopy. The cameras take still images of the canopy every four inches as the scout moves down the […]