Patent attributes
Robotic harvesting of agricultural crops. Robot moves through a field first to “map” the field to determine plant locations, number and size of fruit on plants and approximate positions of fruit on each plant. Once the map of the fruit is complete, the robot can plan and implement an efficient picking plan for itself or another robot. A scout robot or harvest robot determines a picking plan in advance of picking a tree. This may be done if the map is finished hours, days or weeks before a robot is scheduled to harvest, or if the picking plan algorithm selected requires significant computational time and cannot be implemented in “real time” by the harvesting robot as it is picking the field. The system harvests according to the selected picking plan. The picking plan may be generated in the scout robot, harvest robot or on a server.
