China: Robots facilitate harvest lychee in S China.

Storyline Robots facilitate lychee harvest in S China It's peak harvest season in the hometown of lychees; Maoming in southern China's Guangdong Province This year harvesting robots are hard at work snipping fruit from the branches with plier-like arms. They can complete a full harvest in eight or nine seconds. Another piece of equipment includes this tree shaking devices, which gets ripe fruit to fall to the ground for collection. Previous efforts to streamline the lychee industry in Maoming included replacing some 13,000 hectares of lychee trees with shorter varieties to facilitate mechanical picking. [Restrictions: No access Chinese mainland]