Hampson, Michelle. “Amaran the Tree-Climbing Robot Can Safely Harvest Coconuts.” IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News, 1 Sept. 2020, 15:00 GMT, spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robots/amaran-tree-climbing-robot-can-safely-harvest-coconuts.
Article title:
Amaran the Tree-Climbing Robot Can Safely Harvest Coconuts
Photo: HuT Labs
My summary of article:
A group of researchers in India has designed and engineered a robot named Amaran that could potentially replace the need for human harvesters to climb coconut trees and manually harvest coconuts. The basic operating principle of Amaran is having eight flexible, (wireless) controllable wheels surrounding the ring-shaped body of the robot, enabling it to move up and down the coconut tree trunk according to the instructions of the person holding the joystick controlling system. Assistant professor and Amaran team leader Rajesh Kannan Megalingam says that since all coconut trees differ in sizes and alignments of coconuts, designing and engineering a perfect coconut harvesting robot is a complicated task. Still, the team managed to build Amaran which is capable of climbing coconut trees with inclinations up to 30 degrees with respect to the normal.
However, when it came to competing with human experts on coconut harvesting, while it only took an average of 11.8 minutes for the coconut harvesting expert to harvest one tree, it took an average of 21.9 minutes per tree for Amaran to do the same job. Nevertheless, Megalingam suggests that since a human harvester is limited by fitness to harvest about 15 trees per day, Amaran could harvest up to 22 trees per day. Moreover, currently in India, coconut harvesting experts are in demand, meaning that Amaran could resolve coconut harvesting issues on places that depend highly on coconuts.
Megalingam finally mentions that coconut harvesting by man is a very dangerous operation, and so if it is replaced by robots like Amaran, human life will no longer be risked for the job.
My response to the article:
Prior to reading this article, I have never thought about how coconuts are harvested – probably because I live in a place where coconut trees are one of the easiest trees to find. When the article informed me that coconuts are harvested by people – coconut harvesting experts – actually climbing up and down the coconut trees, it shocked me because I can imagine how dangerous of a job that would be.
In that sense, I have profound respect and admiration for the works engineers in India are producing to design and commercialize Amaran, a coconut harvesting robot. I indeed agree with Megalingam's claim that it will reduce the number of instances whereby human lives are put at risk for coconut harvesting and make many people who heavily depend their daily lives on coconuts happier.
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