Currently, one of main bottlenecks of apple vibration harvesting for fresh market is high damage rate.The purpose of this study was to investigate how apples were damaged during catching process in vibration harvesting, and seeking solutions to reduce damage rate in future catching platform design.To reduce damage rate, buffer materials were attached on the platform to absorb collision energy between apples and apples, apple and catching platform.Additionally, a curtain device was designed to mitigate the risk of collision between apples and apples.Meanwhile, in order to reduce apple damage between falling apples and fallen ones in the catching platform,the platform is designed to be tilted at certain angle to control the speed of apples rolling out of the platform.To test the catching experimental platform, two series of experiments were conducted for harvesting Gala and Pink Lady apples at Washington State commercial orchards.For harvesting both of varieties, the tilt angle was set at 10°, 15°, 20°, 25° Results revealed that: (1)damage rates of gala apples were 22.58%, 16.67%, 27.30%, 11.11% when the tilt angle were set at 10°, 15°, 20°,and 25° respectively,.(2)damage rates of pink lady apples were 45.5%, 37.5%, and 46.4% respectively.Furthermore, damage rates of pink lady apples using the catching platform without curtain device and with curtain device were compared.The results showed that the curtain device can reduce the apple damage rate from 53.1% to 37.5% at the tilt angle of 20°.Therefore, adjusting tilt angles and using curtain device could reduce the apple damage rate during catching process.In terms of future design of new platform, it was suggested that a curtain device need to be used to separate failing apples and the catching platform is required to be tilted with 20°.