Robotic automation is the future of production technology. As a result, it makes sense to explore how our robo-friends can help feed our growing population of over 7 billion people.
Thankfully, Panasonic and Bosch subsidiary Deepfield Robotics are working together to produce farming robots to take over the more laborious and menial tasks in the farming industry.
Panasonic’s Tomato Picking Farming Robot
The currently unnamed tomato-picking robot from Panasonic utilizes newly developed sensors and image processing technology to tell ripe veggies from a spoiled or underripe crop.
Picking vegetables like tomatoes is a delicate process, especially when it’s a machine doing the picking. As a result, Panasonic is designing its farming robots to be able to accurately asses a tomato’s color, shape and location.
Cameras mounted on the robot capture more than 70,000 pixels, while the image sensor identifies color. Then the robot picks the ripe tomatoes by the stem to avoid bruising the fruit.