Proposal Summary

The current practices of grape harvest include extensive human involvement such as monitoring as well as specialized manual works. However, the human involvement in grape harvest seems to have reached its limits. For instance, the workers often are not willing to work during the night when harvest conditions are optimal, young people often abandon farming and especially viticulture because of inherent work difficulties, the increasing age of human grape harvesters prolongs harvest duration, therefore it reduces the quality of the harvested grapes and ultimately it reduces the quality of the produced wines. For the aforementioned reasons there is a need to reliably mechanize grape harvest.