HN Reader

"Tomatoes typically bear fruit in clusters, requiring robots to pick the ripe ones while leaving the rest on the vine, demanding advanced decision-making and control capabilities."

At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)?

This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.

Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place.

Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?

Tomatoes are actually easy to pick by robots. The AI part is using the red part of RGB imaging, moving the arm to the fruit and suck it in.

Harder parts are the watering, because that's the part which is always broken. Dutch company.

And detecting diseases. Which is the harder AI part my company is doing.

Moving the heavy robot around is also not that easy, esp. with the cheap dutch robots.

Tangentially related: https://farm.bot/

I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this, because they are duplicating existing things (ag companies already do this), making hardware that would never survive the field (ag companies already solved this), and obscenely expensive (ag companies come up with better cheaper solutions).

> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots.

This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.

So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.

[1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...

fruit picking robot (trees, tomatoes, berries) few years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU

I'm wanting to do this for dead leaves/pruning

Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot

"Robots will automatically harvest tomatoes that are easy to pick, while humans will handle the more challenging fruits." this is EXACTLY the oposite of the way it is supposed to work, and brings to mind agricultural sayings concerning greed and taking unfair advantage, "taking the low hanging fruit", and "cherry picking" with the blame of "inefficiency" going to fall on the plants, and a bigger push to breed "robot friendly" crops or no doubt "cant we just print this shit?"

related company when it comes to agriculture robotics: https://www.beagle-tech.com/

In my neck of the woods we use deers. And they work at night too.