This harvesting robot and coconut cutter was born to replace a very old job in India that right now has hardly any active workforce.
While India’s tech industry has been growing exponentially in recent years, other more traditional jobs such as coconut pickers are out of use, basically because it is a job that carries a certain risk of climbing huge trees.
So that the coconut harvesting industry does not disappear, a group of scientists from the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham University has just manufactured a coconut harvesting robot that, as you can imagine, has as its main virtue the possibility of climbing trees with great ease.
The robot, named Amaran , is currently in its sixth version and has been in development for three years. The robot does not have a very striking design, and is built on the basis of a ring-shaped body that is able to fit around the base of coconut trees of different sizes. The key to its ability to climb so well is that it has eight inward-facing omnidirectional rubber wheels that allow the rig to reach the top of the tree with ease.
The robot is not autonomous, and is controlled wirelessly from the ground via a joystick or with an application for mobile devices that allows scientists to move it up and down as well as rotate it around the tree to place their saw blade. circle in the correct position to cut a batch of coconuts.
The robot has proven to be very efficient during all the tests it has undergone, yet it is capable of climbing up to 15 m tall trees and even with trunk inclinations of up to 30 ° .
And no, it does not work faster than a human being, but it does work for a greater number of hours, so that in the end during a day it is able to collect practically more coconuts than a person.