US Patent Issued to OCTIVA BELGIUM, OCTIVA GROUP on Aug. 5 for "Method and apparatus for automatically picking a fruit" (Belgian Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Aug. 6 -- United States Patent no. 12,376,523, issued on Aug. 5, was assigned to OCTIVA BELGIUM BV (Leuven, Belgium) and OCTIVA GROUP B.V. (De Lier, Netherlands).

"Method and apparatus for automatically picking a fruit" was invented by Pieter Dondeyne (Heverlee, Belgium), Dries Gielis (Everberg, Belgium) and Tom Coen (Zemst, Belgium).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An improved method and apparatus for automatically picking a fruit is described. During the clamping stage, the movement of the fingers is controlled such that a specific maximum clamping force is not exceeded. In addition, during at least a part of the removal stage, the mutual position of the fingers is controlled ...