Introduction

 

 

Intelligent Farm Machines (IFM) is a company that is developing the first high-speed autonomous robotic harvester of oranges and other citrus crops. The global orange crop is a multi-billion dollar industry that continues to rely on manual harvesting despite rapidly escalating costs of human labor, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. Over the past decade, the critical nature of rising production costs has been recognized as a significant threat to the U.S. citrus industry as global competition from low-cost producers has intensified. Despite large federal program grants[1] and smaller SBIR grants from the USDA and local agencies, little progress is being made to introduce a game-changing technology into the industry. We believe that all of the current efforts will be plagued by a reliance on highly complex machine-vision systems that will be slow and inefficient compared with human labor and will not provide meaningful solutions to an industry that requires rapid and substantial solutions to mounting production costs.