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By Craig Cole
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From the kitchen to your daily commute, office work to heavy industry, automation is changing our lives, and it’s even making a difference in the agricultural sector.
Companies like Claas, CNH and industry icon John Deere are all developing self-driving tractors, but it’s one thing to autonomously till a field or harvest row crops like corn or soybeans, it’s much more challenging to pick fresh fruit. And Fieldwork Robotics – among other companies – has a solution.
“Nobody wants to pick fruit anymore,” said Sid Shaikh, director and CTO of Fieldwork Robotics told Newsweek. “The conditions are arduous, it can be quite hot,” the executive added.
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To address a growing shortage of labor and help farmers reduce waste, Fieldwork Robotics, a company founded in 2016 and based in the U.K., has developed an artificial intelligence-powered robot that can pick raspberries, a notoriously delicate fruit.
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As Shaikh explained, their robot mounts to a self-driving, battery-powered base vehicle and incorporates four harvesting arms, each with a patented picking cup, a little paw-like device fitted with an inflatable membrane that gently grips each berry without causing damage.
There’s also machine learning and an array of advanced sensors, enabling these robots to identify fruit that’s ready for picking. “Ee can detect seven different classes of ripeness,” Shaikh said. Some clients may need perfectly ripe berries but, “Others, depending on the time lag between picking and getting to the supermarket… they might want to pick slightly underripe berries,” fruit that is a little firmer and less likely to be damaged during transport.
The machines are remarkably quick. Shaikh noted that during a test in the U.K. last year, it took one of their harvesters about 40 minutes to pick a 328-foot-long row of raspberries. In terms of weight, these machines are on track to harvest around 3.3 to 4.4 pounds of fruit per hour.
Harvesting robots offer growers flexibility. Robots don’t need breaks or take sick days like human employees, there are no wages or benefits to worry about, and these machines could even be used to pick a variety of crops throughout the year by adding different attachments to the arms.
Despite these advantages, Shaikh said their robots are not designed to replace human workers, rather they’re intended to complement them. A human-robot pick team should have a lower cost-per-kilo price than a purely human one, he explained. “And the way we achieve that is we can run extended hours on the same tech stack.”
Additionally, the harvesting robots can clear the majority of a row, and then workers can follow to pick fruit the machines couldn’t see or reach, improving productivity and reducing waste.
Robots are starting to catch up to that precision level, however. Fieldwork Robotics’ next-generation platform “will be looking around the bush a little more,” Shaikh said, to spot berries that would otherwise be missed.
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Thanks to the technology being developed by companies like Fieldwork Robotics, machines may be poised to revolutionize harvesting. You may have never considered it, but the next fruit you sink your teeth into might have been picked by a robot rather than a human.
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