ICAR, GU develop drone base instrument to pluck coconuts

Goemkarponn desk
BICHOLIM: Few research scientists from Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) and Goa University has come up with a model which would help the farmers to pluck the coconuts from the trees and this invention has also earned first place at the national level.
The drone based instrument is such that it goes up in the air and can cut the ripe bunches of coconut. The Goa university has worked upon this since last several years and the drone has been their second version of instrument.
“This is our second version and the first version that we had tried was crawling on the trunk of the coconut tree and it was harvesting the bunches.” Prof Rajendra Gad from Goa University told.
But there was a problem with this instrument as if there were black peeper on the coconut tree it rendered useless as it damaged the peeper which climbing up the tree.
“This problem was solved with the drone and it could harvest any coconut, even if the tree is crooked” Gad told “drone is now a days very popular and we came up with the idea to use drone to harvest the trees. We will make heavy duty machine which would fly up to the crown of the tree, catch hold of the tree and harvest the tree,” Gad explained.
The real challenge is programming of the drone to reach up to the height and other programming things which need to be taken care of in the upcoming days. “We are expecting that in the near future we would get some grants as we have topped the award at national level.” Gad told.
The principal Scientist of ICAR, A R Desai told that they have helped financially for the project even in the future ICAR would help the project to make further development in this regard.
The director of ICAR, Dr Parveen Kumar stated that ICAR would help the project to get working model for the farmers. “It is a very good invention and ICAR would try to get the working model for the farmers” Kumar told.
Initially the cost of the instrument would be more than a lakh and it can harvest about 20 trees in an hour but the experts are hopeful that its speed would increase in near future.
“We need to make few more developments in this instrument as when it goes for harvesting in real life it should not fail” Goa university student, University student, Abhiraj Pednekar told.
It may be stated that the instrument has already won first prize at national level where there were more than 500 teams who participated.