Robotic harvester plucks an Apple every 7 seconds

This is a nice proof of concept, but it&#x27;s not anywhere production-ready.<p>For instance, this apple harvester is using UR5 robot arm. It&#x27;s a very research-friendly robot that I like to work with, but it&#x27;s nowhere ready for outdoors.<p>Its reach is just shy of 1 meter -- not practical for apples as well.<p>Their choice to place an Intel RealSense camera on the wrist of the robot means that they have a USB cable running through the robot. My experience shows that even heavy-duty cables only work for hundreds of hours in such a mode and then require a replacement.<p>The soft gripper that they use is a good choice for the task, but it depends on compressed air, which means an extra tube running through the robot arm - usually it means even more maintenance required.<p>Still, this approach can be productionized, but the end result might look very different from this prototype.

The webpage shows a modal window with the following text:<p>Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news!<p>and two options: &quot;Subscribe&quot; and &quot;I am already a subscriber&quot;<p>That&#x27;s like the &quot;No, thanks, I am stupid&quot; dark pattern, but somehow more stupid and less dark.

Something organic gardeners know is that &#x27;mechanical pest control&#x27; otherwise known as killing the bugs by hand, often is the most effective but it can be hard on your back.<p>And the thing is that orchardists already have expensive harvesting equipment. Tech over and over again likes to fix &#x27;greenfield&#x27; problems and then act like most of their target audience isn&#x27;t &#x27;brownfield&#x27;. If you wait long enough that becomes true, but you get a lot of nasty surprises that should not be surprising at all in the near term.<p>A caterpillar picker or an aphid squisher might be a better use for automation. Hell a caterpillar spotter that can classify species without even touching them might be useful enough.

I&#x27;m <i>guesstimating</i> that a human worker plucks an apple every 1-2 seconds, sustained?

Let me show you a similar system from 2017 that aims to pick bell peppers for a bit of context around what the state of the art in autonomous fruit harvesting looks like:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.qut.edu.au&#x2F;future-farming&#x2F;projects&#x2F;harvey-the-robotic-capsicum-sweet-pepper-harvester&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.qut.edu.au&#x2F;future-farming&#x2F;projects&#x2F;harvey-t...</a><p>&quot;In early 2017, worldwide literature indicated a success rate of only 6% in testing scenarios similar to those used for Harvey, and up to 30% when the crop is modified and leaves are removed.&quot;<p>Picking one apple every 7 seconds is not bad, I&#x27;d say.

With the billions amazon and apple sell you think they would be automating their warehouses more. Ie, pick steps at least - particularly given the description of Amazon warehouses as &quot;hell holes&quot; relative to other warehouse and physical labor jobs (small owner run construction &#x2F; warehouse &#x2F; autobody can also have horrendous discrimination &#x2F; harassment etc stuff, but perhaps better than the amazon alternative?).<p>I&#x27;ve seen restaurant owners hire folks to hit on them in particular. Maybe an industry thing? Music &#x2F; film ideally doesn&#x27;t have that issue but less exposure to that world.

In the video there&#x27;s 15 seconds between the to Apples being thrown in the basket. The apple is dropped from enough height additionally to be damaged afterwards.

A bit of off topic trivia: I&#x27;m betting the title was entered by an iOS user because the only word capitalized out of place is Apple.<p>They don&#x27;t even let you type the words App Store without auto capitalizing it for you even though they are not the only app store and they really don&#x27;t have a trademark on it.

Does it pluck an Apple or an apple?

This one seems more promising: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OhswzqyVuLw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=OhswzqyVuLw</a><p>Articulated arm robots are neat but it take a lot to make them efficient.

I have a question: How could I get started into robotics as a programmer?

There has been an incredible amount of innovation in the food to consumer supply chain.<p>But despite this cost savings, the prices for food keeps on going up. Who’s absorbing all that extra value?

I&#x27;m pretty sure this is plucking a fruit and not an iOS device. Can we lower case the word apple in the title? As it should be based on the original title?

Dear Robot, please bruise my apples some more.

Can it not just place the apples down without dropping them that hard?

holy... this is going to have huge implications for importing cheap foreign labour into the farming industry.