It’s a press release for a patent with a lot of “robot arm could…” and “once $THING_THAT_HASNT_HAPPENED happens…”, and the topper:
“Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.”
Keep your long sleeved shirts and overalls handy, because robots are not going to pick your blackberries for you anytime soon.
But it will be cool when they pull it off. I was just pondering the automation of blackberry picking, as they are starting to come on in the PNW, and I tire of getting scratched up.
robots could do a lot of things better than humans... if the robots actually existed... and the problems/bugs/limitations were all worked out... and they had ready access to enough power to do the job... and they were affordable enough for anyone to bother... etc.
It's nice to dream about stuff we could maybe one day have I guess...
Having filled my share of blackberry flats, the first part of the picking motion is a ripeness check. You want the berry to be firm with a bit of give, and you want it to pull free from the plant easily. The force feedback sensors mentioned here seems to be for training purposes, but they would probably be better used on the finished grabbers to detect ripeness.
There doesn't appear to be anything unique about this particular soft gripper. This blog post is incredibly speculative and really based on nothing more than the author imagining that a grad student's prototype could some day be a single part in a vastly more complex system. There are entire companies that have spent tens of millions of dollars and man-centuries of work trying to pick only strawberries, and strawberries are a lot more durable than blackberries. Vision, motion planning, and controls are all significantly more difficult than gripper design.
The authors didn't test if the robot hand can harvest better than human. They said it "could one day".
They have not even developed the piece that finds and positions the hand.
>Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
I would settle for a robot that can kill blackberry bushes. Blackberries cut me so much, every time I go do maintenance on another noxious weed, English ivy which is busy killing all my trees
Like long haul trucking, only a matter of time until farming is largely autonomous. Companies like Lely, John Deere, and DeLaval pushing far ahead on this stuff.
A soft robot hand using guitar strings as tendons to gently pick blackberries is peak 2025 energy. What stands out is the attention to biomimicry and actual force data from human pickers... that’s not just automation, it’s skill replication.
>> Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
Note also that there are no photos of the robot. I think that's because it hasn't even been built yet, let alone deployed.
Selective plant breeding and robotics pickers are the way forward here. University of Arkansas is the holder of multiple plant patents for better blackberries. New varieties are bred for many, many traits (sweetness, transport, shelf quality, ripening window, etc.)
Harvest costs for fruit are an incredibly important consideration for farms and out of the thousands of potential fruits you could eat, the commercial winners have to be profitable.
There are some awesome opportunities for robotics, computer vision, and ML in agriculture. And if you can reduce harvest costs by 75% like this approach for blueberries, farmers have more market options to select better flavor qualities because the harvest quality goes up: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/impact/innovative-harvest-...
> The robotic gripper was tested on a range of objects, from hard items like a jar of pears and a can of beans to soft, flexible objects like a bag of potato chips and a T-shirt
This paragraph is weird because the article focuses on blackberries, and none of the example is even remotely close
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 38.1 ms ] thread“Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.”
Keep your long sleeved shirts and overalls handy, because robots are not going to pick your blackberries for you anytime soon.
But it will be cool when they pull it off. I was just pondering the automation of blackberry picking, as they are starting to come on in the PNW, and I tire of getting scratched up.
It's nice to dream about stuff we could maybe one day have I guess...
- demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world.
- no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans.
- no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and repair costs
They have not even developed the piece that finds and positions the hand.
>Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
"Train routes across Germany have been a bit congested recently."
We need to automate away the boring/hard jobs.
Could. But does it ? There are a lot of news with "could" lately. Damn, even the world "could" be a better place.
>> Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
Note also that there are no photos of the robot. I think that's because it hasn't even been built yet, let alone deployed.
Prof John Clark likely has invented the berries you've ate: https://news.uark.edu/articles/63163/arkansas-fruit-breeder-...
Harvest costs for fruit are an incredibly important consideration for farms and out of the thousands of potential fruits you could eat, the commercial winners have to be profitable.
There are some awesome opportunities for robotics, computer vision, and ML in agriculture. And if you can reduce harvest costs by 75% like this approach for blueberries, farmers have more market options to select better flavor qualities because the harvest quality goes up: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/impact/innovative-harvest-...
This paragraph is weird because the article focuses on blackberries, and none of the example is even remotely close