A robot that can pick raspberry fruits has been conceived, manufactured, and tested by three roboticists at EPFL’s CREATE Lab in Switzerland. A new concept to lower the cost of building fruit-picking robots served as the foundation for Kai Junge, Catarina Pires, and Josie Hughes’ study, which was published in the journal Communications Engineering. The need for food has increased over the past few years along with population growth. In response, researchers are trying to find more sustainable ways to increase food production. One strategy entails replacing people who undertake manual labor, like harvesting fruit, with robots.
When taking raspberries requires holding the fruit by its center rather than its stem, it is trickier than picking other fruits to avoid damaging them. Too much pressure causes the fruit to be crushed. The lengthy process of field testing and learning is another issue with such specialized applications. In this new endeavor, the Swiss researchers attempted to address these issues using a novel strategy—teaching the robots through the use of artificial plants and fruit. Thus, the team’s effort included creating both a robot and a fake raspberry plant.
The research team discovered that training a robot to select fruit repeatedly in a test lab is far quicker and less expensive than doing so outdoors. They created a robot that picks fruit using graspers and uses cameras and software to recognize targets. The robot improved at identifying and plucking raspberries as a result of repeated practice in the lab. The group then went outside to evaluate the robots’ capacity for picking up actual raspberries.
Conclusion
Having this type of robots in mass production would definitely benefit the farmers in this line of work and agro-world. This would reduce cost of production and also yield more production of the agricultural harvest.
