Archie Snr: A Robotic Platform for Autonomous Apple Fruitlet Thinning

Abstract

Apple fruitlet thinning is critical in cultivating high-quality apples, requiring an expert workforce to manage the orchard. The thinning process requires precise mapping of fruitlet clusters across the tree branches to manage the desired load for each tree. This paper presents Archie Snr, which was developed to autonomously assess the current load of the tree and thin the excess apples as an expert thinner would. The platform has been extensively evaluated in a real-world commercial orchard. The results show the platform can generate an average load count accuracy of 82.1% with a recall of 93.3%. The system was then able to successfully thin 66.14% of the fruitlets from the canopy.