Investigators: Matthew Whiting, Yiannis Amatpadis, Li Tan
We have developed a real-time labor monitoring system with the ability to track and record individual picker rate/productivity during manual harvest of specialty crops. This system utilizes existing commercial harvest equipment and integrates a digital weighing scale, RFID reader, computational unit, and cloud-based software for visualization. As fruit is dumped into a standard collection bin, the system can read simultaneously a picker’s ID (RFID tag) and measure the weight of fruit. This system shows potential to improve the accuracy of picker reimbursement, fruit handling logistics, and decision making in the orchard.