Algorithm could streamline harvesting of hand-picked crops

Farmers are the latest beneficiaries in a world of data analytics. Over the past few years, precision agriculture has been helping farmers make smarter decisions and producing a bigger yield. But most of the studies to date have been in row crops harvested by large machines, made possible by data collected by drones and other means. However, Richard Sowers, a professor of industrial and enterprise systems engineering and mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a team of students have developed an algorithm that promises to give valuable information to farmers of crops picked by hand.