New Strawberry-picking Robot From Japan

We’ve seen strawberry-picking robots before and the Japanese have improved on that, with a model developed by Japan’s National Agricultural and Food Research Organization. We’re talking about a robot that is capable of plucking individual strawberries from the vine and is also smart enough to detect the color of a perfectly ripe strawberry and only pluck those. Thanks to the use of a pair of cameras, it’s able to detect the precise position of each berry in three dimensions, picking only berries that are at least 80% red. This robot can also be modified to handle other sorts of fruits and veggies (yuck) and is currently being field-tested by farmers to see if it can be more efficient at the job than humans. It currently is going about its job at a rate of one berry every 9 seconds and it could help reduce harvesting times by about 40%. Check out a video of it in action after the jump. At least our jobs are safe since robots don’t blog yet, oh wait…

Matthew Chung
Categories: Robots
Tags: Japan, Robot