Abundant Robotics Autonomous Apple Harvester Robot
Abundant Robotics has developed a pretty cool autonomous apple harvester robot. Science fiction fans have been down with this idea since the 1930's.
(Apple harvesting in New Zealand with Abundant Robotics)
Abundant’s apple-sucking creation has been completed and officially brought to market. It already has its first customer, too, in the form of a New Zealand orchard. “Picking fruit is heavy work,” Peter Landon-Lane, COO of apple grower T&G Global, told Wired. “To pick a hectare of apples involves pickers collectively doing something like 5 vertical miles going up and down ladders. With mechanization and robotics, it allows us to take out a lot of the heavy work.”
Science fiction writer Otfrid von Hanstein wrote about a fruit harvesting robot in his 1935 story The Hidden Colony, published in Thrilling Wonder Stories:
...machines, little machines, that went from plant to plant, apparently on caterpillar tracks, cutting off the ripe fruit. We could not make out what they did with them after plucking.
(Read more about the fruit-picking robot)
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