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Introducing IFV at Interpoma – Show press release

21/11/2016

Intelligent Fruit Vision Ltd. (IFV) will showcasing its pioneering orchard vision system at the Interpoma show in Bolzano during late November. The technology has been developed to count and size apples and some pear types in commercial orchards.

 

IFV is a joint venture business formed between Worldwide Fruit (WFL) and the Technology Research Centre (TRC) in the UK.  WFL is better known as major marketer and producer of apple, pear and avocado in the UK.  TRC is an innovation development and delivery company which employs teams of highly qualified engineers, statisticians and computer programmers based near Newark on Trent, Notts.

 

Over the last four years the technology has been developed through a mixture of private investment and external funding to enable counting and sizing of fruit at high levels of accuracy to take place at speeds of around 6km per hour in the orchard.  The vision system is mounted onto a tractor or operated from a quad bike.  The process is simple to set up and the results are mapped to GPS coordinates which enable the end user to map the orchard in terms of crop load and fruit size. Sizing can be split into 5 mm bandings and can be seen live on the screen or in a report generated once the scanning mission has been completed and downloaded onto a PC.

 

Benefits to the grower and marketing companies are numerous.  The technology represents opportunities to provide with some certainty crop forecast and market planning data to levels that have been previously very difficult to repeat on a yearly basis.  The technology works at its best once fruit is around golf ball size and commercial trials have demonstrated extremely high level of accuracy in V systems and post and wire planting systems.  The system is currently in commercial use in the UK and Netherlands with development partners.  A global roll out plan has been developed for the technology and commercial demonstrations will be taking place in the southern hemisphere during January to April 2017 and in the northern hemisphere during July to October 2017.

The IFV team are located in Sector Hall AB, stand B09/06 and look forward to discussing the technology with interested parties during the show.


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