An Energy-Based Approach to Cushioning Material Selection for Table Olive Mechanical Harvesting

Table olives are harvested traditionally by hand to maintain a high quality standard for the market. The labor shortage and the rising costs have driven the harvesting process towards its mechanization, despite the lower quality of the fruits harvested with trunk and branch shakers. Impact absorbing materials, such as polymers, can be used to mitigate damages from impacts to the harvesting machine collecting system, which is usually a reversed umbrella. In this work, an energy-based approach for the selection of cushioning materials to be installed on the harvesting machine is proposed exploiting drop testing experiments and image analysis techniques.