California’s coolest cart

Slowly, silently, efficiently. The self-driving – or autonomous – grape cart does not necessarily attract much attention as it drives through the rows at Parminder Brar’s 900 acre family farm in Kern County, California. But it has a big effect.

Parminder has volunteered to test the cart at his table grape farm this harvesting season. And his verdict is clear: the cart not only makes the workday for his seasonal employees a lot easier. It also drives up productivity.

With the cart between the rows, more human hands can focus on picking. They simply fill up the autonomous cart with boxes full of ripe table grapes as it passes.

This marks a big difference compared to the traditional method. Here, a member of each picking crew collects the grapes in a wheelbarrow which he or she manually pushes through the rows.

“The rows are 100 meters long. Pushing the wheelbarrow is a dusty, sweaty job eating up a lot of time which this cart enables us to spend picking grapes instead. We have six picking crews working in teams. If we had three or four carts for each crew, we would get a huge productivity boost,” says Parminder Brar adding that the carts seem robust and reliable easily navigating around any obstacles.

And now they are about to hit the market with the self-driving version – one of the first ever autonomous vehicles in the specialty farming market.

Justin Meng, President and CEO at Vinergy, says:

“I am extremely proud. With our Gopher IQ cart, we can improve productivity for an average picking crew as much as 30 percent. This translates into real savings for the farmer. It also frees up available hands. And this is key right now as farmers across the US wrestle with labor shortages and rising wages.”

The plan is for the carts to be available on a rental basis for a monthly fee that includes service. Vinergy aims to have the first 60 to 75 carts available next harvesting season and to ramp up from there.

And they are ready at Berendsen Fluid Power – the company that Vinergy teamed-up with to design the cart’s electric drive and control system which includes components such as batteries, electric motors, and advanced sensor technology.

Danfoss has supplied the intelligent display DM1000. It includes a powerful computer with the company’s flagship software PLUS+1® Guide inside, in this case customized to fit Vinergy’s exact needs. The computer and software together make up the digital brain converting sensor signals to physical movements, thereby enabling the cart to navigate the grape rows autonomously.

“The software part of autonomous driving is difficult. Reliability and safety are incredibly important. It is relatively untrodden territory, and few companies master it. Danfoss does. Partnering with them, we were able to bring this solution to market fast. And we are ready for a ramp up,” says Mike Kelley, Mobile Sales Director, Berendsen Fluid Power.

Vinergy already has several customers among fruit growers across California using their semi-automatic grape cart – and are negotiating with potential ones in Mexico and Peru. A handful of California farmers are currently testing the autonomous version, including Parminder Brar.

“We are impressed by the cart’s effectiveness and plan to lease several of them next harvesting season. There is no doubt in my mind that autonomous machines will play a growing role at our farm in the future,” he says.