During the Wimbledon sporting events, enthusiasts will consume around 34,000kg of strawberries every year. Pretty soon their strawberries might have been picked by a small group of autonomous robots capable of picking enough fruit for the championships in less than a week.
The ‘Rubion’ bot, developed by a research and development company specialising in providing robotic solutions to agriculture and food called Octinion, can pick and package ripe strawberries, bruise-free, every five seconds with its delicate clasping mechanism, and has the ability to deliver up to 360kg every single day.
Unveiled by the Actphast 4.0, an innovation hub which supports photonics technology by European companies, it would take just 14 of these new robots less than seven days to pick and package all the unblemished strawberries needed for the Wimbledon season, according to its developers.
A human picker can collect around 50kg (on average) – depending on the skill and experience – in a day. However, human pickers will need to take breaks, be prepared to work for very little and can be tempted to eat some of the berries.
While collecting harder fruits such as apples or pears has often taken a more straightforward mechanical approach, shaking the crops and collecting them off the ground for example, the automated process of picking berries is still deemed a challenge due to the delicate and soft nature of the fruit.
“The picking of soft fruits with machines has always been tricky given that they are so easy to get squashed and the sensitivity needed to discern whether a fruit was ripe or rotten, simply wasn’t there,” said CEO and founder of Octinion, Dr Tom Coen.
“However, Rubion, our autonomous strawberry-picking robot, is a novel way around this problem. It is comparable to a human in many ways: the robot only picks the finest, fresh, red berries and will not bruise or hurt the strawberries in any way.”
Source: eandt.theiet.org
