Raspberry-picking ROBOTS could replace migrant farm workers as British harvests are threatened by dwindling numbers of seasonal staff from Europe
- Fieldwork Robotics has built the six-foot tall robot to pick raspberries
- It hoped it could soon be able to pick up to 25,000 fruits a day in the future
- It will combat a drop in seasonal migrant farm workers from Europe
- Is hoped it can be adapted to pick a wider range of crops than just raspberries
Hours spent toiling away under the beating sun to harvest berries and fruit may soon be a thing of the past as robots look set to replace humans in the field.
A £700,000 machine built by the University of Plymouth has succeeded in plucking a raspberry from a plant and carefully placing it in a punnet.
The painstaking process takes a whole minute to get one berry because it requires a combination of soft robotics, clever AI and ‘deep learning’.
It stands around six foot tall (1.8metres) and will combat a continued drop in the amount of migrant farm workers available for the arduous harvests.
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A £700,000 machine built by the University of Plymouth and spin-off firm Fieldwork Robotics has succeeded in plucking a raspberry from a plant and carefully placing it in a punnet (pictured)
Fieldwork Robotics, a spin-off from the university dedicated to agricultural robots, built the machine and says it will be able to pick 25,000 fruits a day in the future.
This will make it more efficient than human workers who manage approximately 15,000 in an eight-hour shift, according to the company.
The development comes amid Brexit uncertainty, which has seen the number of migrant workers plummet, leaving farmers scrabbling to get their yield.
The technology is also hoped to be adapted to more crops in future, with the company also developing robots to pick cauliflower, for example (pictured)
Farmers in Cornwall testing a machine last year that picks cauliflowers (pictured) from the field without bruising them. It works in a similar way to the human hand by squeezing each cauliflower before deciding whether it is ready to be harvested
Booming economies in countries such as Romania and Poland has seen a supply chain of seasonal staff cut off.
The machine was created in association with Hall Hunter, a firm that grows many of Britain’s berries and supplies supermarkets such as M&S, Tesco and Waitrose.
Dr Martin Stoelen, a lecturer in robotics at Plymouth where the machine was created, spoke at a recent agriculture conference.
She said: ‘We looked at human muscles, such as the biceps and triceps, and the way humans can flex and stiffen those muscles depending on the situation.
‘We’ve also been using “deep learning” to build a large database of raspberries that will make it easier for the robot to classify and grade them.’
The technology is also hoped to be adapted to more crops in future, with the company also developing robots to pick cauliflower, for example.
Farmers in Cornwall tested a machine last year that picked cauliflowers from the field without bruising them.
It worked in a similar way to the human hand by squeezing each cauliflower before deciding whether it is ready to be harvested.
The GummiArm robot was also the work of Dr Stoelen.
‘A lot of producers are very worried about where they will get their reasonably priced manual labour from – and rightly so,’ Dr Stoelen said at the time.
‘Manual harvesting also represents a large portion of their total costs, often it can be up to 50 per cent, so looking at addressing that, especially against a backdrop of Brexit, is very important.’
