A team of Israeli and US researchers has designed a watermelon-picking robot endowed with artificial vision and sensitivity to harvest watermelons.

The new robot, now being commercialised, is the result of collaboration of three Israeli institutes of higher learning: Ben-Gurion University, The Weizmann Institute of Science and the Agricultural Research Organization(ARO). The US partner is Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

The new robot, named VIP ROMPER, consists of a mobile platform on which are mounted an image processing system, air blowers and a mechanical arm with an attached gripper.

Tractor power pulls the platform through the field while cameras take pictures that are analyzed by the system. The air blowers ruffle the foliage to expose the fruit. When the harvester identifies a melon that is bigger than a certain size - and therefore presumed to be ripe - it extends the gripper to grab the fruit and lift it off the ground.

Harvesting watermelons has always been relatively expensive because it is a labour intensive process. The new robot has the potential to significantly reduce the costs involved with picking watermelons, taking into account that watermelons are grown in 90 countries with worldwide production exceeding 50 billion pounds a year.

Onboard software evaluates the image shape, brightness, and texture to locate the melons: knives connected to the gripper slash the stalk, and the gripper places the watermelon on a conveyor belt. The robot guides itself through rows of maturing melon plants with only occasional human steering corrections.

In field tests, the harvester correctly identified melons ripe for picking 85 per cent of the time. Professor Yael Edan of Ben Gurion University estimates a two-armed version could attain a picking rate of one and a half seconds a melon.