March 2019 - 5

CROO
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Wishnatzki and Paul Bissett,
Harvest Croo CEO, spoke at the
strawberry symposium and hosted a
tour of Wish Farms' 1,600 acre (625
acres planted strawberries) G&D
Farms in Duette, Florida.
" We have over four miles to the
back of this farm, " Wishnatzki said. " I
believe this is the largest contiguous
strawberry farm in the U.S. Some are
bigger, but not one that's a contiguous
piece of property. "
The current business model indicates
the Harvest Croo machines will be made
available to farms on a service-level
agreement in which growers will pay for
use of the harvester in the same way they
pay their human pickers - basically on a
modified piece rate basis.
Wishnatzki cited statistics showing
a shrinking agriculture labor force and
demographics that indicate the decline of
the younger workforce needed to harvest
specialty crops such as strawberries.
" The problem has nothing to do with
politics, " he said. " We're seeing fewer and
fewer people coming out in field to do
the work and we're now having to rely on
H-2A. H-2A is a short-term solution for
a long-term problem. "
requires laws of physics to be broken,
then it is impossible. If it is just an
engineering problem, nothing is
impossible, " Wishnatzki said.
Collaboration has been vital to the
development of the technology. Despite
the tour location, " this is not a Wish
Farms project, " Wishnatzki said.
Large companies that include
California Giant Berry Farms, Naturipe,
Driscoll's and others have helped fund
the project and expertise has been
provided by the University of Florida
and the University of South Florida.
Croo Robotics has developed several
patented products and trade secrets,
including development of the " Pitzer
Wheel " by company co-founder and
chief technology officer Bob Pitzer. " It
really gets us to the commercial speed
we need in picking, and is the very
unique thing that gets us to where we
need to be. "
The wheel has a series of claws on it
that allows the ability to pick the plant
very rapidly. " It's not a multi-access
robotic arm that has to grab something
and move it somewhere, " Wishnatzki
said. " The wheel maneuvers the claw to
pick the strawberry. The wheel spins to
give us the speed to pick the plant much
more rapidly. "
The wheel grabs the berry with the
soft silicone rubber claw, with a spinning
action that replicates what a human
picker does, breaking off the stem.
" The stereovision system used in the
robot is a trade secret, providing us
with some proprietary ways we're using
different light spectrums, " he said.
" We're well above 98 percent accuracy
Harvest Croo CEO Wish Farms' Gary
Wishnatzki explains the evolution of the
Harvest Croo Robotics strawberry harvester.
" My experience at picking
strawberries is it is a young person's
game, " Wishnatzki said. " Harvesting
strawberries hasn't changed in the past
100 years. We're still doing it the same
way. If we don't have young people
coming to the field, we're going to have
to have to rely on robotics. "
Skepticism, collaboration
Wishnatzki said despite hearing the
word 'impossible' a lot, he also has been
told development of a robotic harvester
should be doable because " we've put
people on the moon. It has not been
a totally smooth ride from where we
started to where we are today. We're not
quite commercialized yet, but we're on
the road to do it. "
Having encountered some skepticism
from growers regarding the potential
for machines to harvest delicate fruit
requiring human touch and inspection,
Wishnatzki said advances in computer
processing power and visioning has
made the technology feasible.
Rex Lee, a consultant on the project
who is CEO of Pyramid Imaging, helped
Croo Robotics develop its vision system.
" Dr. Lee told me that if a solution
on picking properly colored, ripe fruit, "
Wishnatzki said. " Stereovision has been
around for decades, but the difference
now is the processing power that has
made all of this possible. Just in the last
five years, we're processing something
like 30 gigabytes a second and doing
hundreds of image pairs. It's an amazing
amount of computing power. Twenty
years ago that just wasn't possible. "
Making an impact
Wishnatzki equated the project's status
with cell phone technology in the early
1980s.
" Nobody imagined the smart phone of
today and all of the applications you're
going to be able to do with that, " he said.
" Right now, growers just want to make a
phone call, they just want to pick berries.
But we need to be thinking about all of
the added benefits that are going to come
after we are done picking berries. "
Wishnatzki anticipates the Harvest
Croo Robotics system will eventually:
* Lower harvest costs.
* Work on weekends.
* Improve quality.
* Save energy and reduce cooler
bottlenecks
* Allow mechanical scouting
of fields.
* Conduct runner cutting and
pruning
* Increase yields by at least 10
percent.
" It will be pretty much a slam dunk for
us to lower harvest costs the way harvest
rates are going, and enable working on
The next generation platform that is in development for the Harvest Croo Robotics strawberry
harvester. Its developers believe the unit is within a couple of years of full commercialization.
weekends and a regular pick schedule
- that's going to be huge. Right now
our workers don't always show up on
Saturday and Sunday. "
" Quality will improve because we're
going to avoid picking during the hottest
parts of the day. We'll be picking 24
hours a day, with more picking at night
when the berries are cooler and less
likely to bruise, " Wishnatzki said.
" When you think about the capacity
of commercial coolers, they're limited
by the hot part of the day when you get
this bottleneck of warm fruit coming in
during the afternoon, " he said. " If you're
picking berries over a 24-hour day, you
eliminate the problem, and actually
double the capacity of the coolers and
reduce the energy use in the process
because you're cooling cooler berries
than hot berries. "
Mechanical scouting will be done
using hundreds of images per plant
every three days. Using AI (artificial
intelligence), there's going to be different
algorithms that will not only identify
problems, but locate them to a specific
GPS location.
Production forecast models also
will improve with the Harvest Croo
Technology, Wishnatzki said.
" Currently, at Wish Farms, we have
three our four full-time people that all
they do is go out and count blooms and
try to determine what our production is
going to be like in three or four week, "
Wishnatzki said. " It's such a small sample
size and inexact science right now. I
believe we're going to get much better
forecasting once we're taking all of these
images of the plants. "
Solution seekers
Grow system structures will be
important to maximize robotics use.
" With this robot, we're going to
have to keep the plant size pruned
and trimmed. In the early years we'll
probably be doing some hand trimming.
Hopefully, we'll be partnering with some
universities to get some robotic ways
to prune plants and cut runners. We're
really going to try to eliminate labor.
" I think we're going to increase
yields by at least 10 percent, "
Wishnatzki said. " We will be efficient
in managing the amount of fruit we are
packing in clamshells. "
" Our goal is not to require growers
to change how they grow strawberries
and invest in expensive equipment
systems, " he said. " There may be some
small differences that may have to do
with spacing or something but our
goal is to be able to pick on standard
beds which is what is going to get
us commercialized and accepted. If
growers are going to have to change and
invest in expensive grow systems that
would be a major barrier.
" That's the reason 70 percent of the
strawberry industry has invested with us
because they see this is the best path to
commercialization, " he said.
For more information on
Harvest Croo Robotics, visit www.
fruitgrowersnews.com and www.
harvestcroo.com. FGN
FGN | MARCH 2019 | 5
The Harvest Croo Robotics strawberry harvester, nicknamed " Harv, " in action at G&D Farms in
Duette, Florida

http://www.fruitgrowersnews.com http://www.harvestcroo.com

March 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of March 2019