Tea harvester help the efficient development of the tea industry

The tea plucker has a recognition model called deep convolution neural network, which can automatically identify tea tree buds and leaves by learning a large amount of tea tree bud and leaf image data.

The researcher will input a large number of photos of tea buds and leaves into the system. Through processing and analysis, the tea garden processing machine will remember the shape and texture of the buds and leaves, and summarize the characteristics of the buds and leaves in the photos. The accuracy of the identification of sprouts and leaves is also higher.

Tea plucking machines is the most difficult field in the tea garden machine picking technology. It is necessary to break through the difficulties of bud identification, positioning and picking speed. Crops such as apples and tomatoes are easy to identify, and it doesn’t matter if picking is slow, while the difference between young buds and old leaves of tea trees is not very large, and the shape is irregular, which greatly increases the difficulty of identification and positioning. When picking tea, tea farmers should be “accurate, fast, and light”, so that the buds and leaves should be intact, and the fingers should not use force; the fingernails should not touch the buds, so as not to affect the quality of the tea. The professor introduced that tea picking by machine should be divided into two steps, one is cutting and one is sucking. There is a small pair of scissors at the end of the robotic arm, which will locate the petioles of the buds and leaves according to the positioning information. Once the knife is cut, the buds and leaves will be separated from the branches. At the same time, the negative pressure straw attached to the end of the robotic arm will suck the cut buds and leaves into the tea. basket. Generally, one bud and one leaf of early spring tea is about 2 cm, and the petiole is only 3-5 mm. The bud leaves usually grow between the old leaves and the old stems, so the operation accuracy of the tea picking machine is very high, and the cutting is crooked. , it will destroy the tea branches, causing damage, or the cut off buds and leaves are incomplete.

In the future, if such a tea garden machine can be industrialized instead of manual picking, so as to solve the labor shortage and expensive labor problems encountered by tea farmers, it will be able to help farmers continue to increase their income and provide strong support for the tea industry. As the application of digital technology extends from cities to vast fields, farmers who used to “rely on the sky” have realized “knowing the sky and plowing”. Digital has helped the development of modern agriculture to a new level, and it has also given farmers more and more confidence in securing their “rice bowls”. Today’s Zhejiang countryside is full of new vitality.