Vegebot Pickings

Harvesting vegetables and fruit is much more time consuming than harvesting field crops such as wheat. They are also more manpower consuming. Think about the sheer number of people required to harvest grapes from a vineyard during season. In order to make harvesting an easier task, scientists at Cambridge have been working with a robot prototype.

This vegetable picking robot uses Artificial Intelligence to identify which common agricultural crop is ready to be harvested. It was initially designed by the scientists at the University of Cambridge to recognize and harvest iceberg lettuce in a lab setting. Since then it has been tested in a number of field conditions at a local fruit and vegetable co-operative .

It’s performance has been improving gradually as the robot automatically learns from previous experience. Naturally the “Vegebot”, as it has been nicknamed, is not as fast or efficient as a human worker as of now. Still the paper in the Journal of Field Robotics hopes that it will be improved enough to be put to use in actual field conditions.

Though it may be while, this science project may end up creating a robot that is used to pick your salad in the future. It would work out more economical than hiring human labor for the same task.