{"id":142495,"date":"2022-07-19T12:03:23","date_gmt":"2022-07-19T17:03:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/agricultural-engineers-design-early-step-for-robotic-green-fruit-thinning"},"modified":"2022-07-19T12:03:23","modified_gmt":"2022-07-19T17:03:23","slug":"agricultural-engineers-design-early-step-for-robotic-green-fruit-thinning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/agricultural-engineers-design-early-step-for-robotic-green-fruit-thinning","title":{"rendered":"Agricultural engineers design early step for robotic, green-fruit thinning"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/agricultural-engineers-design-early-step-for-robotic-green-fruit-thinning2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Penn State agricultural engineers have developed, for the first time, a prototype \u201cend-effector\u201d capable of deftly removing unwanted apples from trees\u2014the first step toward robotic, green-fruit thinning.<\/p>\n<p>The development is important, according to Long He, assistant professor of agricultural and <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/biological+engineering\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">biological engineering<\/a>, because manual thinning is a labor-intensive task, and the shrinking labor force in apple production makes manual thinning economically infeasible. His research group in the College of Agricultural Sciences conducted a new study that led to the end-effector.<\/p>\n<p>The apple crop is a high-value agricultural commodity in the U.S., with an annual total production of nearly 10 billion pounds and valued at nearly $3 billion, according to He, who is a leader in agricultural robotics research, previously developing automated components for mushroom picking and apple tree pruning. Green-fruit thinning\u2014the process of discarding excess fruitlets in <a href=\"https:\/\/techxplore.com\/tags\/early+summer\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">early summer<\/a>, mainly to increase the remaining fruit size and quality\u2014is one of the most important aspects of apple production.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Penn State agricultural engineers have developed, for the first time, a prototype \u201cend-effector\u201d capable of deftly removing unwanted apples from trees\u2014the first step toward robotic, green-fruit thinning. The development is important, according to Long He, assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering, because manual thinning is a labor-intensive task, and the shrinking labor force in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1506,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-142495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-food","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=142495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/142495\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=142495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=142495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=142495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}