This posting should be a warning to anyone who has a career in harvesting fruit. You could be replaced by a robot.
This robot has been developed by Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, and it has the ability to detect how ripe a strawberry is, and then can cut the stalk without damaging the sweet fruit itself. There is a video of it after the jump so you can see the strawberry-picking robot in action.
This robot works using two cameras so it has a 3D image of fruit. It then can detect how ripe the strawberry is by its color, and can pick it from there. The whole process itself takes about 9 seconds.
Just to give you an idea about how much time this saves, my Source says that it takes about 500 hours to pick all strawberries in a 1,000 square meter field, but this robot can beat that by 200 hours. I am assuming that these robots would be on some sort of tank treads or all terrain wheels in order to pluck all the strawberries in a square kilometer area.
The designers believe that they can possibly build robots that can pick other fruits besides strawberries. It is definitely the future of farming, complete with robot workers.
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