How do you make a robot better at picking fruit?
These days when you tuck into a tomato soup, prepare some roast potatoes or take a sip of wine - there’s a good chance that those fruits and vegetables were harvested by machines.
It’s quicker, cheaper and can mean less food waste from labour shortages.
But some plants are easier for machines to harvest than others.
Soft fruit need a delicate touch, and the raspberry has proved a particular problem for robotic pickers.
So far machines haven’t been able to match up to a human’s ability to pluck the fruit from the stem without crushing it But now a team in Switzerland think they have a solution and…
it’s this.
A robotic raspberry.
This fake fruit is designed to train robots to be better raspberry pickers.
It mimics elements of a real raspberry - the squishiness, the way it clings to the stem, the way the stem itself bends when you pull on it…
