Citrus Harvesting

A piston driven flexible manipulator is used to strike citrus fruit at their stems, knocking them to the ground undamaged. The manipulator heading can be oriented by a parallel stage at its base and stirred in mid flight through cable brakes. Target selection is done through machine vision.

MOVIES:
Shooting down citrus

I design simple and elegant mechanisms that exploit natural phenomena to achieve their function by drawing inspiration from nature and a deep understanding of the physics of a problem.