AI helps robots figure out how to grab apples right
Crop Improvement
The next time you see an autonomous harvester rolling through an orchard, this is the kind of vision system deciding which apples it can actually grab without bruising them or fumbling the branch.
Picking apples sounds simple, but a robot arm needs to know not just where a fruit is, but which way it's facing so it can grip it correctly without damaging the tree or the fruit. This study trained a two-stage AI system: one part finds and outlines apples even when they're partly hidden by leaves or other fruit, and a second part spots key points on each apple to figure out its orientation, essentially drawing an invisible line through the fruit's stem to its bottom. The result was over 92% accuracy in estimating that orientation, which could make automated apple harvesting more reliable.
Key Findings
The YOLO-SD segmentation model achieved 95.2% average accuracy (mAP50) for identifying pickable apples while cutting model size to just 2.47 million parameters
The YOLO-RSM keypoint detection model reached 90.3% accuracy, outperforming YOLOv8n, YOLO11n, and YOLO12n by 2.4%, 2.6%, and 4.7% respectively
The 2D axis estimation method achieved 92.68% accuracy with an average angular error of just 7.23 degrees
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers built an AI vision system that helps orchard robots figure out exactly which apples on a tree are actually reachable to pick, and how each fruit is oriented, by combining fruit segmentation with keypoint detection to estimate the apple's growth axis.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
A two-dimensional axis estimation method for pickable canopy apples based on YOLO cascade network
Introduction In a complex orchard environment, canopy apples are obscured by various factors, making it hard for apple harvesting robots to accurately determine which apples can be directly harvest...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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An apple is the round, edible fruit of an apple tree. Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple, the most widely grown in the genus, are cultivated worldwide. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, Malus sieversii, is still found. Apples have been grown for thousands of ...