Yeongju in North Gyeongsang Province will test harvesting and transport robots in hillside orchards as part of a government-backed service-robot demonstration project. The city said it secured 352.5 million won in national funding, matched by the same amount of municipal funding, for a total project budget of 705 million won.
The trials are designed around conditions that make orchard work difficult to automate, including slopes, uneven surfaces and the need to move harvested fruit without damaging it. Yeongju plans to test driving stability, task performance and practical usefulness at local orchards through December.
Automation meets a labor-shortage problem
The project is aimed at a persistent challenge in rural Korea: an aging agricultural workforce and difficulty finding seasonal labor. If the robots can work reliably in mountain orchards, they could reduce the physical burden of carrying produce and help farms operate with fewer workers during harvest periods.
Field trials will determine whether the technology is ready for wider use. The important measures will be reliability on real terrain, safety around workers and crops, and whether productivity gains are large enough to justify the cost for farms.