More than 130 million pounds of peaches are produced in Georgia per year, and the Southern staple has a total farm gate value of more than $71 million, according to recent estimates.

But cultivating peaches is a complex and manually intensive process that has put a strain on many farms stretched for time and workers. To solve this problem, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has developed an intelligent robot that is designed to handle the human-based tasks of thinning and pruning peach trees, which could result in significant cost savings for peach farms in Georgia.

“Most folks are familiar with the harvesting of fruit and picking it up at the market,” says Ai-Ping Hu, a GTRI senior research engineer who is leading the robot design project. “But there’s actually a lot more stuff that gets done before that point in the cultivation cycle.”

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