Design and Prototyping a Harvester for Litchi Picking

Litchi is a very important economic fruit in Guangdong and Guangxi, China. At present, litchi is still harvested manually. Litchi harvesting machinery could help speed up litchi picking. In this paper, design, modeling and prototyping of a litchi harvester were discussed. An experiment was made to compare harvesting speed among picking by hand, picking by manual fruit picker and picking by litchi harvester. Experimental results indicated that litchi harvester can speed up litchi picking in the long term, and picking by litchi harvester is significantly faster than by hand in picking high tree fruit.