Robot for Intelligent Harvesting(RIH). Credit: Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM)
A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Sheffield has developed a group of robots that can work together to harvest fruit autonomously.
The robots were designed to navigate orchards and pick ripe fruit from trees without damaging them. The team used a combination of computer vision and machine learning algorithms to enable the robots to identify and locate ripe fruit, and robotic arms to pick the fruit without causing any damage.
In a recent study published in the journal Science Robotics, the researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of the system in an apple orchard. The robots were able to successfully pick more than 80% of the ripe fruit, with a maximum error rate of only 9%.
The team also tested the robots in a peach orchard and found that the robots were able to successfully identify and pick the ripe fruit without causing any damage to the delicate fruit.
Dr. Daniela Rus, a co-author of the study and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, said in a statement, “Our goal is to develop robots that can work seamlessly with humans to improve efficiency and productivity in a variety of industries, and this research brings us one step closer to achieving that goal.”
The researchers believe that their system could revolutionize the agricultural industry by reducing the labor required for fruit harvesting and improving the efficiency of the process.
In the future, the team plans to improve the robots’ ability to work in different orchard environments and to develop robots that can work together to perform more complex tasks.
Overall, the development of these autonomous fruit-picking robots shows great promise in revolutionizing the agricultural industry and improving the efficiency of fruit harvesting.
Via The Impactlab