Who you work with#
Atria Foundation, described in Brief 12. The Foundation’s farm names coconut harvesting as its single biggest operational problem.
The situation#
Coconut palms grow tall, with a smooth unbranched trunk and the fruit at the very top. Harvesting means getting a person or a machine up there, cutting bunches, and getting down. Skilled climbers are scarce, ageing, and the work is dangerous.
The farm reports that the robots currently available do not work well on coconuts.
What is going wrong#
Unharvested or late-harvested coconuts are lost income. Dependence on a shrinking pool of climbers is a risk the farm cannot control. And unlike most farm tasks, this one cannot be solved by simply hiring more people, because the skill takes years to acquire.
Why it is not fixed yet#
It has been attempted seriously, and you should know the numbers before you propose anything.
Amaran is an unmanned robotic coconut tree climber and harvester built at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, in development since 2014 under Rajesh Kannan Megalingam and published in IEEE in 2020. A ring-shaped body clasps trunks of varying diameter, eight wheels drive it up and around the trunk, it copes with trunks leaning up to 30 degrees, and a robotic arm with four degrees of freedom cuts the bunches. It is teleoperated by app or joystick and carries a backup battery so it can come down if power fails.
Its measured performance is the most useful fact in this brief. Amaran averages 21.9 minutes per tree, of which about 14 minutes is setup. That works out to roughly 22 trees a day, against about 15 for a human climber before fatigue. Cost is described as the barrier to wider deployment.
The team’s own summary of the difficulty is worth repeating: no two coconut trees are the same.
Skills and Expertise#
- Branch — Mechanical, with Electronics on control and teleoperation. The most demanding mechanical problem in the pool.
- Technical skills — Mechanism and gripper design, climbing and traction systems, structural analysis and failure modes, actuators and control, remote operation, safety engineering, cost engineering.
- Other skills — Reading prior art properly, measuring where time actually goes, designing for the worst tree rather than the best one.