Happy New Year from HarvestMoore. It has now been five years since HarvestMoore LLC (HM) was founded. It has been 12 years since I decided to see if I could find apples using remote technology so they could be picked. It was a hobby to challenge my mind during retirement. My first patent was issued January 5th 2016. My hobby then turned into a job. I had hoped to get some Ag business interested in taking the company and the technology that I had developed and run with it. No such luck! Everyone wanted a sure thing and saw accepting an invention for harvesting apples invented by a retired engineer from the nuclear industry as a no sure thing. They wanted to see a machine picking apples, not a series of proof tests which shows each internal system works. Working as an individual with moral support from my retired friends, I decided to fabricate a robotic arm that could find and pick an apple, remove the fruit from the tree and maintain quality. A demonstration was conducted in August 2018. What the demo pointed out was that the level of the recognition needed to be greater and needed to be above 90 percent fruit finds to be viable.
I have now learned more about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Image Recognition than I ever thought I wanted to know. Much of this happened with the help of a great friend Dave Clark. I also received 5 more patents to further secure the intellectual property. The other item I learned was, “I DO Not want to manage a manufacturing company”. I am looking for a company that can secure funding and has a manufacturing facility to take what HM has developed and move to a production machine. The machine would cost on the order of $230,000 to build and sell for $500,000.
Remember I retired once. The COVID 19 has a way of refocusing where you want to go.