Yikes everybody! Could it be that an important income source for hard-working, budget-minded grey nomads is about to be cut off.
A southeast Queensland strawberry farmer is reportedly developing a fruit picking robot that could cut production costs dramatically … and presumably put pickers out of a job.
The ABC reports that machine moves up and down a strawberry field and judges the ripeness of the fruit using digital imaging technology.
Glasshouse Mountains farmer Ray Daniels says he hopes the robot will help growers become more competitive.
“Strawberries are labour intensive, and in the US they work picking for $10 and $12 US a tray, whereas in Australia we can’t even pick them for $18,” he said. “So to keep competitive in an international market we need to lower our cost of production.”
And if they can do it with strawberries, who’s to say they won’t soon be able to do it with every fruit and vegetable under the Australia sun?
This is not the first time that a fruit picking robot has reared its mechanical head to threaten an enjoyable, though tough, income provider for all manner of travellers?
Late last year it was revealed that Japanese researchers were developing a robot that could automatically identify and pick ripe berries.
Developed by the minds at the Institute of Agricultural Machinery’s Bio-oriented Technology Research Advancement Institution (IAM-BRAIN), the machines can apparently harvest more than 60 per cent of a strawberry crop.
The robot targets berries that are at least 80 per cent red.
Even though each machine takes nine seconds to pick a strawberry, they can cut harvesting time from 500 hours to 300 hours for a 1,000-square-metre field (about a quarter-acre), said BRAIN’s Shigehiko Hayashi.
The robots can also pick strawberries at night.
The berry ’bot has a stereo camera system that images the strawberries in 3D. Image-processing algorithms gauge their ripeness, and if a berry is at least 80 per cent red, the machine neatly snips it at the stem and deposits it in a bin.
A commercial version might also be able to harvest crops like tomatoes. However, it may be that fruit that doesn’t colour while ripening will prove more challenging for robots to recognise and pick properly.
There’s hope fruit-picking grey nomads, there’s hope!
