ABSTRACT
The motivation toward adoption of mechanization and automation technologies for fruit and vineyard production has been associated primarily with labor productivity, labor cost, and availability, as well as other factors such as cultivar/varietal improvements, fruit quality and safety, disease and pest pressures, environmental concerns and regulations, and global market pressures. Although the vast majority of progress has been realized during the past 50 years, there seems to be an accelerated effort in developed countries in the past decade as two major factors come to bear. The rst is rapidly escalating labor cost along with a shrinking labor force, and the second is a signicant acceleration in agricultural automation technological development enabled by aerospace, defense, and industrial efforts. The concept of appropriate automation becomes crucial, because global market pressures limit the cost of automation to competitive levels. Unlike the aerospace and defense industries, fruit and vineyard producers must remain economically competitive with global suppliers. Consequently, the selection of appropriate technology is probably the most important aspect of automating any production practice. It is therefore necessary to consider the full spectrum of solutions when addressing a production problem, which include manual aides, traditional mechanization, mechatronically enhanced equipment, semiautonomous robotics with human assistance and oversight, or ultimately fully autonomous systems. In the past several decades, many of the tree fruit, vegetable, nut, and vineyard producers have promoted the development of mechanized/ automated solutions for various production tasks, including harvesting. However, successful harvesting development has largely been limited to processed applications where fruit damage during harvesting is minimally problematic, since the fruit will be typically processed within 24 h of harvest. Several fresh market horticultural commodity groups around the United States are facing growing global market pressures that threaten their long-term viability. For instance, Brazilian orange growers can produce, process, and ship juice to Florida markets cheaper than can Florida growers. In the event that tariffs are eliminated, numerous horticultural commodities across the nation will not be able to compete in either domestic or international markets with their counterparts in Latin America and Asia. The combination of low commodity prices both domestically and abroad, high labor prices, and low labor productivity present signicant challenges for U.S. agriculture.
