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The Elusive Hunt for a Robot That Can Pick a Ripe Strawberry
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Khari Johnson

Business
Feb 16, 2022 7:00 AM


THE ELUSIVE HUNT FOR A ROBOT THAT CAN PICK A RIPE STRAWBERRY

It's a tricky, delicate task that combines machine vision and robotics. Progress
has been slow, but entrepreneurs and farmers continue to invest.
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Photograph: Soichiro Koriyama/Bloomberg/Getty Images

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Application

Robotics

End User

Small company

Sector

Agriculture

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Technology

Machine vision

Robotics

Ten years ago, a company called Agrobot demonstrated a strawberry-harvesting
robot in a field in Davis, California. Today, Agrobot’s strawberry picker
remains a prototype.

The long wait underscores the challenge for any berry-picking robot: Identify a
berry that is ripe enough to pick, grasp it firmly but without damaging the
fruit, and pull hard enough to separate it from the plant without harming the
plant. Agrobot CEO Juan Bravo said his company’s machine can’t compete with
people who can pick fruit by hand and pack it into clamshells.

Still, growers are looking ahead to a day when it will be hard to find people
willing to stoop in the fields all day, and expensive to pay them. So growers,
technologists, and researchers are continuing to pursue machines that can do the
job. A recent survey of nearly 50 robotic harvesting projects showed that
strawberry-picking projects attracted more interest than projects targeting any
other fruit over the past two decades.



In the latest sign of this interest, indoor-farming company Bowery recently
acquired Traptic, a Silicon Valley startup created in 2016 that last year began
commercial deployments with Naturipe and Blazer Wilkinson, two large strawberry
growers. Bowery will adapt Traptic for indoor vertical farming because its
systems, like most of its competitors’, primarily operate outside in the fields
of California or Florida.

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Traptic's robotic picker working in a field in California.



Traptic’s creators say it can pick 100,000 strawberries a day. It will now work
exclusively in Bowery indoor farms, marking the first use of robotic arms at the
company, which relies heavily on computer vision, sensors, and technology to
grow lettuce for customers like Safeway and Walmart. Bowery intends to move
robotic arms between indoor strawberry rows—as it does in fields—using automated
vehicles. In addition to harvesting, Bowery will explore use of robotic arms to
pollinate strawberry flowers and do maintenance work like thinning or pruning
leaves.

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Bowery was founded in 2015 and has operations near cities including New York and
Philadelphia. Backers include GV, formerly Google Ventures, and individuals like
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and former Amazon consumer CEO Jeff Wilke. In May
2021, Bowery raised $300 million at a $2.3 billion valuation and announced plans
to expand operations to the Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth areas early next year.



Last year, Bowery opened Farm X, a New Jersey research facility where the
company explored vertical farming of cucumbers, strawberries, and tomatoes. Farm
X opened shortly after Bowery hired Injong Rhee, who previously worked on
machine learning projects at Google, as chief technology officer. Rhee said
Bowery will use Traptic’s technology to begin selling strawberries this spring,
adding that the tech is “mature enough to get us there.” Bowery envisions making
Traptic a core part of Bowery’s fruit and vine operations.



Rhee said Traptic stood out from other companies in the space because its robot
doesn’t touch the strawberry. Instead it grabs strawberries by the stem, pulling
strongly enough to detach the fruit but lightly enough to avoid damaging the
rest of the plant.

Such tasks are an ongoing challenge. A recent study reviewed nearly 50
harvesting robot projects from 2000 to 2020 and found that harvesting robots
have yet to see widespread use, in large part because most robots still can’t do
a better job than a human.

Hugh Zhou is lead author of an analysis of AI progress in fruit-harvesting
robots and their commercial viability. The study was carried out by researchers
developing an apple-harvesting robot at Monash University in Australia. Based on
what’s possible today, Zhou said he can envision a scenario in which robots pick
70 percent of easy-to-classify strawberries and humans pick the remaining crop.
It’s just in recent years that HarvestCROO Robotics and a handful of other
companies have advanced their systems to the point that they’re picking
strawberries at rates competitive with people.

“It’s one of those problems that we’ve mostly gotten through, but the last few
percent are going to be hard to build up.” 

Kyle Cobb,  cofounder, Advanced Farm


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Zhou says the makers of fruit-harvesting robots are heavy on demo videos and
light on data. The majority don’t share damage rates publicly, or how well their
vision systems perform when picking strawberries from clusters or strawberries
partly hidden behind leaves, two primary reasons computer vision systems fail to
pick fruit. Crushing or bruising berries is still a common problem, and
accidentally harming one strawberry while attempting to pick another is a
problem that is often overlooked and rarely mentioned.

Companies working with robots to harvest fruit say there are reasons many
haven’t moved out of the prototype stage and only a handful of machines are in
operation today.

In April 2021, AppHarvest, operator of the largest greenhouse in the US,
acquired Root.ai, a Somerville, Massachusetts-based company whose Virgo machine
picks grape tomatoes with a small, three-pronged robotic gripper. That
technology is now used to pick strawberries and cucumbers as well, using four-
and eight-fingered grippers. As part of the deal, Root.ai CEO Josh Lessing
became CTO at AppHarvest.

Picking rates have doubled since the acquisition, Lessing says. He says the
company now wants to reduce the cost of the robots as it moves toward finalizing
Virgo hardware in 2023.

Today Virgo picks healthy fruit better than most people, but it needs to improve
its ability to detect ripeness and damage less fruit before being deployed in
widespread use. Reducing the damage rate is tied to more use of soft grippers
and passive forms of robotic control, says Lessing, a former research director
at Soft Robotics.

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Proponents of agricultural computer vision systems argue that being able to
predict when fruit is ripe will lead to improved sales, reduced waste, and yield
gains as the global population expands to 10 billion.



Robots can also help grow and market expensive specialty fruits. Robots working
in tandem with automated vision systems can monitor crops 24 hours a day to
predict the ideal time to pick a ripe, red strawberry. The startup Oishii raised
$50 million last fall for its vertical farming operation as it works to
replicate the process of growing sweet Omakase strawberries typically found in
the Japanese Alps. A box of 11 berries goes for $50.

Advanced Farm operates 10 robotic picking machines at Blazer Wilkinson
strawberry farms in Central California. Each machine can pick roughly 100 pounds
of strawberries an hour. Tarps drape along the top and the side of a machine
that sits atop two rows of strawberries at once. The tarps keep out light and
help cameras and computer vision systems classify fruit and control robotic
arms—light can affect the computer vision system, so the machines mostly operate
at night.

Keep Reading



Search our artificial intelligence database and discover stories by sector,
tech, company, and more.

Each time a ripe strawberry is identified, a silicone robotic hand with a
suction cup in the middle moves in, grabs the strawberry, and then uses three
fingers to twist it away from the stem and place it in a bin. Advanced Farm
designed nearly 50 versions before deciding on the current design of its picking
system.

Advanced Farm cofounder Kyle Cobb says the company’s robots are “in the
ballpark” but are still more expensive than human strawberry pickers. “It’s one
of those problems that we’ve mostly gotten through, but like with all problems
with robotic harvesting, the last few percent are going to be hard to build up,”
he says.

John Wilkinson of Blazer Wilkinson says he became interested in robotics a few
years ago in response to labor shortages. He says the technology is still in the
research and development phase, but he thinks it will ultimately become
essential.

Hillary Thomas is research and technical director at farm conglomerate Naturipe.
She says companies working on strawberry-picking robots have made big strides in
reducing rates of damage since Naturipe started testing robotic harvesting in
operations in 2016. Naturipe works with robotics companies, including Traptic
and Harvest CROO Robotics, and she says each company can now reliably pick
marketable fruit that meets company quality specifications.

Factors such as the cost of these machines and their output will determine
whether the robots replace farm workers, but Thomas said there’s no longer any
question that robots can overcome challenges to successfully harvest
strawberries. Whether robots are adopted by growers in the fields of California
will come down to the cost per pound of delivering berries to consumers.

Thomas says she can envision human-machine scenarios in which robots pick at
night and people pack during the day. Grape harvesters in California fields
already work alongside Burro robots. Robots are also being introduced to carry
out other dedicated tasks on farms, like weeding, pruning, pollinating flowers,
and painting fruit in UV light to protect it from mold or mildew.



Zhou, the Australian researcher, says that despite today’s shortcomings, the
machines are improving. Recent advances signal that “soft robotics combined with
deep learning algorithms might be the solution to the last mile of this
fruit-harvesting challenge,” he says.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Khari Johnson is a senior writer for WIRED covering artificial intelligence and
the positive and negative ways AI shapes human lives. He was previously a senior
writer at VentureBeat, where he wrote stories about power, policy, and novel or
noteworthy uses of AI by businesses and governments. He is based... Read more
Senior Writer
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Topicsartificial intelligencerobotsroboticsagriculturefarming



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