A human picker can collect around 50kg (on average) – depending on the skill and experience – in a day. However, human pickers will need to take breaks, be prepared to work for very little and can be tempted to eat some of the berries.

While collecting harder fruits such as apples or pears has often taken a more straightforward mechanical approach, shaking the crops and collecting them off the ground for example, the automated process of picking berries is still deemed a challenge due to the delicate and soft nature of the fruit.

“The picking of soft fruits with machines has always been tricky given that they are so easy to get squashed and the sensitivity needed to discern whether a fruit was ripe or rotten, simply wasn’t there,” said CEO and founder of Octinion, Dr Tom Coen.

“However, Rubion, our autonomous strawberry-picking robot, is a novel way around this problem. It is comparable to a human in many ways: the robot only picks the finest, fresh, red berries and will not bruise or hurt the strawberries in any way.”

The robot picks individual strawberries grown in raised beds a few feet off the floor and can sort the fruits by size or weight and pack into punnets as it goes along, the developers have said.

The strawberry-picking robot collects soft fruits like a human, bruise-free, at a rate of 11,500 berries (between 180 and 360kg) in a 16-hour day. Furthermore, with its patented arm-mechanism, the robotic picker can detect a ripe strawberry with lasers before “clasping” a hanging berry from beneath.

According to Octinion, picking and sorting speeds are comparable to the ideal human picker but with advanced quality-monitoring and the ability to work without a rest or a break, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Chief technology officer and co-founder of the company, Dr Jan Anthonis said: “Our robot doesn’t need a break or a holiday and doesn’t complain about the weather. Rotting and unpicked fruit from a lack of human pickers on farms all over the world could soon be tackled with robots.”

In order to pick out the ripest strawberries, ‘Rubion’ uses photonic sensors to detect the wavelengths of light, or the “signatures” given off from a ripe, red strawberry according to a pre-programmed set of characteristics determined by the RGB camera built into the “eye” of the robot.

A human picker can collect around 50kg (on average) – depending on the skill and experience – in a day. However, human pickers will need to take breaks, be prepared to work for very little and can be tempted to eat some of the berries.

While collecting harder fruits such as apples or pears has often taken a more straightforward mechanical approach, shaking the crops and collecting them off the ground for example, the automated process of picking berries is still deemed a challenge due to the delicate and soft nature of the fruit.

“The picking of soft fruits with machines has always been tricky given that they are so easy to get squashed and the sensitivity needed to discern whether a fruit was ripe or rotten, simply wasn’t there,” said CEO and founder of Octinion, Dr Tom Coen.

“However, Rubion, our autonomous strawberry-picking robot, is a novel way around this problem. It is comparable to a human in many ways: the robot only picks the finest, fresh, red berries and will not bruise or hurt the strawberries in any way.”

The robot picks individual strawberries grown in raised beds a few feet off the floor and can sort the fruits by size or weight and pack into punnets as it goes along, the developers have said.

The strawberry-picking robot collects soft fruits like a human, bruise-free, at a rate of 11,500 berries (between 180 and 360kg) in a 16-hour day. Furthermore, with its patented arm-mechanism, the robotic picker can detect a ripe strawberry with lasers before “clasping” a hanging berry from beneath.

According to Octinion, picking and sorting speeds are comparable to the ideal human picker but with advanced quality-monitoring and the ability to work without a rest or a break, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Chief technology officer and co-founder of the company, Dr Jan Anthonis said: “Our robot doesn’t need a break or a holiday and doesn’t complain about the weather. Rotting and unpicked fruit from a lack of human pickers on farms all over the world could soon be tackled with robots.”

In order to pick out the ripest strawberries, ‘Rubion’ uses photonic sensors to detect the wavelengths of light, or the “signatures” given off from a ripe, red strawberry according to a pre-programmed set of characteristics determined by the RGB camera built into the “eye” of the robot.