Advancing Over the Top Citrus Harvesting Equipment for Fresh Markets: Vision Systems Development

Numerous challenges face the Florida and U.S. citrus industries, including global market pressure, urban and environmental pressures, labor issues, and emerging diseases and pests underscoring the need for new production approaches. Over the last decade, over 200,000 acres of Florida citrus production has been lost due to the citrus canker eradication program and citrus greening known as HLB. HLB is now considered endemic in Florida and hundreds of thousands of acres are in step decline, with minimal hope of finding remediation solutions. Long term hope rests on finding HLB resistant varieties, and developing advanced management strategies that can control the psyllid population, repel them from groves, and manage trees in an optimal economic framework. One approach being considered is Advanced Production Systems (APS) that use high density semi-dwarfed trees, and open hydroponics with optimized nutrient and water availability, which accelerates plant growth. When combined with HLB tolerant rootstocks, the concept seeks to increase yield production per acre, while simultaneously shortening the time to return on investment, which means that grove life can be shortened by disease pressure and still remain viable economically. However, this new grove architecture will require new equipment systems to manage production and harvesting.Our focus will be on developing an integrated fruit detection and servo control planner. We will develop a computer hardware architecture capable of processing the data intensive machine vision algorithms in real-time on a mobile platform. Scalability must be kept in mind since it is likely that each mobile harvester will carry 4 to 6 harvesting arms, thus multiplying the computational demands. We envision a three layered machine vision system for each harvesting arm.