This fall, HarvestMoore, LLC had a significant breakthrough in the company’s efforts to prove our bud recognition technology can “see” 90 percent of the fruit buds on a blooming tree in the spring. While much work remains to validate and recreate the findings, at HarvestMoore we are convinced that this bodes well for the future of the company’s AI Fruit Finder.
According to a consultant with John Deere, HarvestMoore’s AI Fruit Finder concept must be able to successfully recognize and pick roughly 90 percent of the tree fruit in order for the device to be viable as a tool that competes with manual labor in the field.
The two photos shown are of the same tree, a couple of years apart. The first image shows our initial attempts at bud and tree fruit recognition with the yellow squares representing AI bud recognition and the red circles showing buds that were located by human observation. The second photo is the same tree, using the improved AI bud recognition we tested last spring just before pruning season.
As you can see with your own eyes, our approach is beginning to yield results as we approach 2021 and we couldn’t be more excited to deliver this technology to an industry which has been pummeled by the impacts of the pandemic over the last year. While we are still a few years away from having a product to offer in the field, this fall’s findings suggest we are on the right track to deliver technology that will address the labor needs of three fruit and nut orchardists in the U.S.