Intelligent tea picking machine can improve tea picking efficiency by 6 times

In the mechanized harvesting test demonstration base under the scorching sun, tea farmers operate a self-propelled intelligent tea plucking  machine in the rows of tea ridges. When the machine swept the top of the tea tree, fresh young leaves flew into the leaf bag. “Compared with the traditional tea picking machine, the efficiency of the intelligent tea picking machine has increased by 6 times under the same labor conditions.” The person in charge of the Luyuan Planting Professional Cooperative introduced that the traditional tea picking machine requires 4 people to operate together, and can pick up to 5 acres a day. , The current machine only needs one person to operate, and it can harvest 8 acres a day.

Compared with spring tea, the taste and quality of summer and autumn tea are inferior, and the price is also cheaper. It is mainly used as the raw material of bulk tea, and is generally harvested by machine. The harvesting yield is high and the picking cycle is long. Harvesting 6-8 times is the main way for tea farmers to increase their income. However, with the shortage of rural labor force and the increasingly prominent aging population, improving the mechanized harvesting level of summer and autumn tea and reducing labor costs have become urgent problems for tea gardens and tea garden machinery operators.

In recent years, researchers have successively developed knapsack single-person tea picking machines, crawler self-propelled tea harvester and other equipment, and built more than 1,000 acres of summer and autumn tea mechanized tea harvesting test demonstration bases. “Traditional machine harvesting requires multiple people to operate. We have applied automation, intelligence and other technologies to tea-picking machinery to further reduce the labor intensity of harvesting and make tea-picking ‘higher’.” The project leader introduced.

In addition, this machine also “grown” a pair of intelligent “eyes”. Due to the poor flatness and standardization of the ground in most tea gardens, the tea pods are uneven, which increases the difficulty of machine harvesting. “Our machine has a set of depth perception devices, just like a pair of eyes on the machine, which can automatically identify and locate under dynamic operation, and can automatically adjust the height and angle of tea picking in real time according to the height change of the tea pod.” In addition , This set of intelligent equipment has effectively improved the quality of summer and autumn tea harvesting. According to the experimental test, the integrity rate of buds and leaves is over 70%, the leakage rate is less than 2%, and the leakage rate is less than 1.5%. The operation quality is greatly improved compared with manual harvesting.