Abstract
Pruning is one of the most important tree fruit production activities, which is highly dependent on human labor. Skilled labor is in short supply, and the increasing cost of labor is becoming a big issue for the tree fruit industry. Meanwhile, worker safety is another issue in the manual pruning. Growers are motivated to seek mechanical or robotic solutions for reducing the amount of hand labor required for pruning. Identifying tree branches/canopies with sensors as well as automated operating pruning activity are the important components in the automated pruning system. This paper reviews the research and development of sensing and automated systems for branch pruning in apple production. Tree training systems, pruning strategies, 3D structure reconstruction of tree branches, and practice mechanisms or robotics are some of the developments that need to be addressed for an effective tree branch pruning system. Our study summarizes the potential opportunities for automatic pruning with machine-friendly modern tree architectures, previous studies on sensor development, and efforts to develop and deploy mechanical/robotic systems for automated branch pruning. We also describe two examples of qualified pruning strategies that could potentially simplify the automated pruning decision and pruning end-effector design. Finally, the limitations of current pruning technologies and other challenges for automated branch pruning are described, and possible solutions are discussed.
Highlights
The tree fruit industry is an important component in the U.S agricultural sector, accounting for26% ($11 billion) of all specialty crop production
In [66], a laser sensor was used to collect observation of fruit trees aiming for automatic dormant pruning, the results showed that the system is able to identify the primary branches with an average accuracy of 98% and estimate their diameters with an average error of 0.6 cm
Even though the current system is too slow for large-scale practice, the study showed the potential of using the proposed approach to develop robotic pruning systems in the near future
Summary
The tree fruit industry is an important component in the U.S agricultural sector, accounting for. The majority of tree fruit crop production systems are highly dependent on seasonal human labor. Machine vision one technologies in the automation of tree fruit production. Availability labor, and thealternative safety issues in thefor manual pruning, alternative solutions for Automated mechanical pruning and precise robotic pruning, was pruning fruitpruning, trees areincluding becomingnon-selective essential. Example offixed production costasbreakdown inirrigation percentage for each for a Gala orchard1.(40 The cost, such land, trellis, setup, etc., category is not included [17].apple orchard (40 Acres). We discuss the tree training systems and strategies for automated pruning, the machine vision sensing technologies for tree branch identification, the current development of automated pruning systems, and the issues and challenges that remain in the procedure
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