Robotic Nation Evidence

Produce Picking Robots

Researchers announce watermelon picking robot

From the article:

A team of Israeli and US researchers has designed a watermelon-picking robot endowed with artificial vision to do the job of harvesting... Harvesting watermelon has always been relatively expensive because the process is labor-intensive.

The machine consists of a mobile platform on which are mounted an image-processing system, air blowers and a mechanical arm with a gripper attached. Tractor power pulls the platform through the field while cameras take pictures that the system analyzes. The air blowers ruffle the foliage to expose the fruit. When the harvester sights a melon bigger than a certain size -- and therefore presumed to be ripe -- it extends the gripper to grab the fruit and lift it off the ground.

Onboard software evaluates the image's shape, brightness, and texture to locate the melons. Knives connected to the gripper slash the stalk, and the gripper places the melon on a conveyor belt.

First its watermelons, then it is strawberries, then it is pumpkins and so on. Before you know it, several million migrant farm workers are out of work.

This is certainly not unusual in agriculture. We already have wheat picking machines, corn picking machines, cotton picking machines and so on. The important point with the watermellon picking robot is that a robotic vision system is the enabling technology. As these vision-based harvesting robots come on line, there will also be vision-based retail stocking robots, vision-based hamburger assembling robots, vision-based bathroom cleaning robots, vision-based truck driving robots, vision-based roofing robots and so on, all coming online at approximately at the same time. Tens of millions of workers will be displaced simultaneously. See Robots in 2015 for details.