What could be more blissful than lying back on your picnic blanket while a robot picks perfectly ripe strawberries for you? Yes, we all share this arcadian dream. Sadly, it comes with a $50,000 price tag. That’s roughly how much a new strawberry-picking robot will cost when it goes on sale in Japan early next year, so start saving now. Developed in part by automation firm Shibuya Seiki, the bot was shown off in Tokyo this week at the Auto-ID & Communication Expo trade show.
The machine moves on rails in a greenhouse. It has a 3D stereo camera system to image the berries and judge which ones are ripe according to color. When it finds one, a robotic arm reaches out and snips its stem. Into the basket it goes. It can harvest a berry every 8 seconds.
$50,000 strawberry-picking robot to go on sale in Japan [Cnet]
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