FEATURE | e d i t i o n
Innovation in the Fields Harvest CROO Technology Helps Growers Overcome Challenges by TERESA SCHIFFER
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ONE OF THE BIGGEST CHALLENGES any type of grower in Florida faces right now is a shortage of manual labor. Finding enough hands to harvest a crop is imperative to prevent massive food waste, but sometimes that is practically impossible to do. If a farmer does manage to round up enough workers to bring in a crop, there is the very real risk that some of them might move on to the next farm before all the work is done. Currently, roughly 25 percent of any strawberry grower’s fields go unpicked altogether each season due to a lack of manual labor available. Harvest CROO was born of this necessity for reliable labor to harvest crops. Harvest CROO is a modular robotic vehicle that automates the harvesting, grading and packing of strawberries. It consists of a 40-foot long transporter that moves through the field on wheels, plucking every ripe berry with robotic hands located underneath the body of the transporter. Joe McGee is the CEO of Harvest CROO 10 | CFAN
Robotics, the company that developed and finetuned this technology. He has been on the company’s board since December 2018 and has been there as the robotic harvester developed from a prototype into a machine that is ready to be deployed in the field for its initial trials. In the past three years, he has seen a number of technical issues resolved to result in a truly effective robotic harvester. The Harvest CROO makes use of the most
innovative, cutting-edge technology available to perform its tasks. It is equipped with a LIDAR system that provides the Harvester with a 360-degree, three-dimensional view of a field, allowing for precision navigation through rows of strawberries while avoiding collisions with people and other obstructions. The machine’s vision system scans each berry and determines whether it is ready for picking. The berry is then further inspected and determined to be suitable for the fresh market, processing, or rejection. Sixteen independent robots are nestled beneath the transporter carriage, each with six picking hands capable of gingerly removing the ripe fruit from plants. Harvest CROO can be operated at night to take advantage of cooler temperatures during the process, making it easier to harvest and transport the delicate berries FloridaAgNews.com
