Pepper harvesting robot on its way

Globally, over 26 million metric tonnes of peppers are produced every year, with Europe’s crops alone amounting to $400 million. However, although picking the fruits is a simple job for a human, it remains highly labor-intensive. Now, researchers have invented a robot which can do all the hard work for us.

The robot pepper picker runs on a rail system across the plants and features a snake-like arm and pincers which it uses to harvest and store the peppers. Now, for you or me, this would be a simple task, but for robots, it’s an entirely different ballgame. The robot has to navigate the garden or greenhouse, identify the pepper, cut it and put it somewhere safely — easy for man, difficult for an artificial intelligence.

Identifying the fruits (and most importantly, only the ripe fruits) is extremely challenging. Developing this type of robots for agriculture has raised great interest in recent years, but because it’s so difficult, it left most engineers stumped. This is why this project is so significant — because it represents a breakthrough. It’s not particularly elegant or efficient, but it works and it can get way better.

Read more at ZME Science