Orchard researchers are continuing to find new applications for an agtech device called Cartographer at Agriculture Victoria’s Tatura SmartFarm.
Cartographer — invented by AgTech firm Green Atlas — is mounted on an electric all-terrain-vehicle at the farm and uses a combination of cameras, scanner, strobe lighting and GPS to capture flower, fruit and canopy data from tree crops.
Agriculture Victoria research leader for crop physiology Ian Goodwin said the Cartographer was originally trialled in a 2020-22 research project exploring the use of sensors to assess fruit quality of peach, nectarine, plum and apricot for export.
“The Cartographer can travel along orchard rows capturing data from both sides of the row at up to 10km/h. making it much quicker and more accurate than manual methods and less labour intensive,” Dr Goodwin said.
“It uses artificial intelligence to identify, count and measure fruit traits from its cameras, such as fruit size and colour, to help us calculate potential harvest yields.
“The Cartographer has become a very handy scientific instrument for us that can rapidly analyse an entire orchard block, so we are now using it in wide range of orchard research.
“It’s been used for stone fruit, apple and pear research and we’re now studying its economic value for growers as an orchard management tool,” Dr Goodwin said.
“We manually calibrate the Cartographer for accurate fruit counts, but otherwise it’s entirely machine-driven data capture for fruit size, fruit colour and canopy size so the labour-save and return on investment would be of interest to producers.”
Agriculture Victoria’s Mildura SmartFarm has also purchased a Cartographer to help researchers analyse quality and production within its almond experimental orchard and potentially in citrus and olive groves.
Further information is available.
For the Sensors for Summerfruit project, go to: https://www.foodagility.com/research/sensors-for-summerfruit
For the PIPS3 Program, go to: https://apal.org.au/programs/more-industry-programs/pips3program/
Agriculture Victoria and Horticulture Industry Networks Cartographer videos can be viewed at: https://tinyurl.com/49xcty3e
The Green Atlas Cartographer website is at: https://greenatlas.com/cartographer/