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US 2021/0360848 A1Published application
Produce harvesting apparatus and precision farming system
AssigneeAgri Technovation (Pty) Ltd
InventorAlbert Hendrik BIJKER
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AssigneeAgri Technovation (Pty) Ltd
InventorAlbert Hendrik BIJKER
Estimating the term…
This invention relates to a precision agriculture produce harvesting system and produce harvesting apparatus configured for integration with the system, an essential feature of which is a harvesting device subsystem (100) that includes a harvesting device, for instance pruning shears (102) and a harvesting separation stroke detector (108) housed within a control module housing (110) mounted to the shears (102). A person operating the pruning shears (102) produces discernible separation strokes when the handles (104) of the shears (102) are squeezed together to produce a shearing action. The stroke detector (108) detects the separation strokes of the shears (102). By the addition of the control module (108) to the pruning shears (102), the shears are essentially converted into a data logging device by means of which important aspects of a produce harvesting process can be digitised and supplied to a harvest data digital data processing system.
A produce harvesting system including a harvesting device subsystem comprising a manual individual harvesting device configured for attachment to the person of the harvester, the harvesting device including programmable logic means and a separation stroke detector comprising a harvester motion transducer configured, in use, to monitor the motion of the harvester and to detect a harvester motion consistent with a predetermined produce separation stroke by means of which the harvester separates the harvested produce from a produce-producing organism in use, the programmable logic means being programmed to record each detected produce separation stroke in a separation stroke counter.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.