This is pretty impressive. If they get good at strawberries and other produce susceptible to bruising, they’ve got it made with a captive audience of farmers who will get a tireless 24x7 robot bringing an end to backbreaking manual labor.
I think they're just about there with strawberries! There's a machine called the Berry 5.1 which has shown promising results so far. I recall it was mentioned as part of this story (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/the-age-of-rob...), which provides interesting details on how the nature of farm-work is changing.
I've seen people paying twice the minimum wage for the no-skill job of picking vegetables and still seen farms not get enough takers resulting in the food rotting on the fields.
Bring on the robots. People hate that work. Literal backbreaking labour.
I wonder if this will actually result in better working conditions for the workers. The Cotton Gin just made cotton more profitable and actually resulted in much more misery for the working class and slaves at the time.
The gotton gin processed picked cotton, necessitating more pickers. This machine picks tomatoes, reducing needs for pickers. After picking, all remaining processing for tomatoes is highly automated/ bulk operations (trucking, washing, canning or packaging and distributing as fresh produce).
In the photo, it looks like it is picking plum or cherry tomatoes. Is it able to harvest heirloom varieties without damage? Will this make it possible to have better tasting tomatoes at your local store?
I'm actually interested in how would this actually provide better testing tomatoes. Are you suggesting it will lower the harvesting cost of tastier varieties and therefore they will make their way to your local store?
I think the idea is that we could see a price drop in easily bruised but tastier varieties.
What about transportation? I always thoughts they use these horrible rock hard tomatoes because they don't get damaged during transportation, I never really thought about picking. I was slaving 14 hour days a lot of summers picking strawberries in a foreign country and I can't recall we ever talked about the damaged during picking. The main thing was to keep the damaged ones away by either throwing or by eating them.
Are the hard crapatoes even easier to harvest?
There is a story that grocery store tomatoes were bred to withstand a 13 mph impact into the truck from a harvesting machine, but lost a lot of flavor. If this picker robot can gently pick heirloom tomatoes and place them into containers without damage, I speculate that consumers would prefer the better tasting tomato.
I think their solution works pretty well: the “hand” is both a plucker and basket. Plucking means minimal squeezing; it pulls and rotates to pluck, then rather than trying to grasp the produce (fruit (or berry in some minds)) it cradles it in a recessed basket which is like a 360 “palm”. Obvs they can adjust the basket size and shape for diff crop types.