Most sweet cherries for fresh-market are harvested manually by migration pickers in the USA. Considering small fruit size and large number on a tree, cherry harvesting is labour intensive and time consuming.
However, previous research reports indicate that high percentage of harvest-induced fruit damage was observed in field trials, which is considered as a major obstacle for the acceptance of mechanical harvesting by the industries. For instance, and found considerable bruise damage on the harvested fruits in the field trials of mechanical harvesting for sweet cherries.