Strawberry picking work is tedious and exhausting. It requires thousands of low-paid workers to spend hours walking through strawberry fields, bending over to pick ripe fruit, examining what can and cannot be picked, using their fingers dexterously to pluck the fruit without ruining the plant. etc.
Because it is such a demanding and poorly paid job, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find people willing to do it, and many farmers have seen fruit rot on their land when they fail to harvest it. In California, for example, farmers apparently lose about a fifth of their crops due to a lack of labor.
A robot created by the California-based startup Traptic (America’s largest strawberry-producing state) promises to fix this. Her name is Ceres .
Automation has already been applied to several different staple crops. Crops like wheat and corn are routinely harvested by machines. Strawberries and other fruits, however, present a unique challenge: they are too delicate for most machines .
The biggest problem with strawberry picking is that it requires so many different skills and adapting to so many changing situations that it is an extremely difficult process to automate. Only a human being is capable of doing it with enough skill.
However, Traptic has managed to program artificial intelligence algorithms that are already capable of performing this task with a skill equal to that of humans. The device created by Traptic is a robot that can be installed on a small tractor and that, through its visual recognition algorithms, can identify the fruits to be picked from the foliage .
To check if the strawberry is ripe enough, the algorithms also check its color . The vision system uses 3D cameras and neural networks to also be able to determine the position with a margin of one millimeter of error. Finally, if the fruit is fine, then a mechanical arm picks it up with enough skill so as not to damage the plant or the strawberry.
At the tip of the robot arm there is also an important element: a gripper . This custom collet is one of the most unique elements of the system, as it is rigid enough to pull out the burs, but soft enough not to crush them in the process. To do this, the metal base of the claws is reinforced by rubber bands that have enough elasticity to adapt to the irregular shapes of the fruits.
Ceres is currently being tested by farmers in Northern and Southern California, different climates that allow its ability to grow strawberries to be assessed year-round.
Other companies working on robotic strawberry harvesters include Agrobot, CROO Robotics, and Advanced Farm Technologies (AFT), which have also commercialized their T-6 strawberry picking robot and it is already in use in California. For its part, Traptic is planning to go beyond strawberries: it wants its algorithms to work in all kinds of crops , regardless of the difficulty.
