I think this video helps:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU</a><p>As you can see this is some iterations away from being optimal but it is certainly getting there.<p>Primates eyes co-evolved with fruit evolving the colour-coded 'I am ready to eat' system they have to let us know when things are ripe. Imagine if the fruit picking machine gets to be reasonably aware of what fruits are ripe in the orchard at a given moment in time and is able to optimally pick fruit for a given customer, e.g. a sandwich bar chain may want ready to eat fruit whereas the supermarket may want something that ripens at home. A reasonable AI system could be trained to do a better job of reading the 'ripe' signals of fruit and even 'know' that given fruit since it was just a bud on a flower. Waste could be cut to a minimum if the system was aware of apples ready to go bad or drop to the floor.<p>As well as picking there is also the matter of grading the crop, getting it clean and so on. There is no reason why this machine can't do all of that at source, so the apple gets washed, blown spotlessly dry with a Dyson style dryer and then instantly sorted/graded and packed into some 100% nitrogen packet of some sort, sent to the distribution centre and on the shelves for lunch the next day.<p>Hopefully our new robotic overlords in the fields will work from above. Instead of heavy tractors, plant and people on the ground you could have some lighter weight equipment strung out from above, a mesh of wires held up by some massive wind turbine towers, to which the fruit picking machines might traverse.<p>McCain Chips are made with robots on the production line that pick out any defects, again, our fruit picking machines could do this and grade any cleaned produce as catering grade, nonetheless prepared clean and packed in nitrogen to prevent any further degradation. A whole new world of better product and time to market might be possible by handing over the fruit picking bit to the robots. Apples could even be picked when they got to a 'perfect size/weight' and not just graded that way, trees could be picked in such a way that all the fruit attains this 'ideal' which is optimal given inputs.<p>Such a system would work 24/7 in all seasons, tending the crop one way or another on a large estate, with some of its robotic arms going places at all times. You would need a team of maintenance and other support roles to keep things operational, all requiring a different skill set to the pickers of today. Their wages would be higher and spent in the local community rather than sent out of the country.<p>Orchards need not be so regimented for machines in this brave new world, orchards could have a mix of trees of all shapes and sizes, with different land use below, open to people and a proper 'forest floor' for small furry animals. Fruit in such areas could be expected to be part eaten by bugs but our robot overlords could also be experts at picking the bugs out to produce perfectly good fruit for pies and juices.<p>Rejecting our soon-to-be robot fruit picking machines is like rejecting the horse drawn plough as it might put the humans that pull ploughs out of business.