The arm doesn’t go back to the home position, it just retracts a bit, lets go and the apples go into a container. It has an underactuated gripper at the end with a single motor which grips the apple and rotates it about 90 degrees to detach it. After it finds an apple, it gives the controller the XYZ location and the arm then reaches for the fruit. Tell me a bit about how the robot works and its components.ĪD: So the FFR arm has a vision system to segment and detect the apples.
We brought those to the demo, along with a few Jackals and had a pretty good time! So we decided to put one of the arms on our Grizzly RUV robot which fit pretty nicely. We started collaborating and then a few months ago, Microsoft approached us and asked us to exhibit at their Think Next exhibition that they have every year. We were helping them with the arm’s optimization. FFR are building a simple robotic arm – a three degree of freedom Cartesian robot, with the goal of having 8 or 12 of these arms picking apples (or other fruits) simultaneously. Avi, who is the CEO and Co-Founder, approached us a few years ago after hearing one of my students give a talk on optimization of a tasked-based harvesting manipulator. There is a new Israeli start-up called FFRobotics (Fresh Fruit Robotics or FFR). As part of this work, we are not only designing the optimal robot, but are also looking at designing the tree – finding the optimal tree in order to further simplify the robot. This is something we have been working on for a few years. So we’re collecting data and modeling trees, we’re doing optimization and we’re finding the optimal robot for a specific task.
We might need different joints, different lengths and so on. We’re actually seeing that different tasks, although they look very similar to us- apple picking or orange picking or peach picking – are actually very different if you look at the robot’s kinematics. Because cost is very important in agriculture, we’re trying to reduce price and find the optimal robot to do specific tasks. fruition?ĪD: One of my PhD students is doing more theoretical work on task-based design of manipulators. How did the apple harvesting robot project come to. But, generally, we’re mostly focused on agriculture robotics and robotic systems in the open field. Other applications are search and rescue, automation in construction and environmental related work as well. We work on soft robots, dynamic robots, and optimization of manipulators, mostly with civil applications, a lot of them related to agriculture.
I came back to the Technion in Israel and started the Civil, Environmental, Agricultural Robotics lab in the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering. In our talk, they discussed the robot’s design, the challenges of apple picking, tree training and their experience demoing the robot for Microsoft’s CEO at the Think Next 2016 exhibition.ĪD: I founded the CEAR Lab about four years ago after finishing my PhD and post doc at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I got the chance to sit down with Amir and Avi to learn more about the project and the collaboration between the Technion and FFR.
Together, they presented an apple harvesting robot that will autonomously navigate apple orchards and accurately pick fruit from the trees. Amir Degani is an assistant professor at Technion Institute of Technology and Avi Kahnani is the CEO and Co-Founder of Israeli robotics start-up Fresh Fruits Robotics (FFR).