In April 2021, AppHarvest, operator of the largest greenhouse in the US, acquired Root.ai, a Somerville, Massachusetts-based company whose Virgo machine picks grape tomatoes with a small, three-pronged robotic gripper. It’s just in recent years that HarvestCROO Robotics and a handful of other companies have advanced their systems to the point that they’re picking strawberries at rates competitive with people. Based on what’s possible today, Zhou said he can envision a scenario in which robots pick 70 percent of easy-to-classify strawberries and humans pick the remaining crop. The study was carried out by researchers developing an apple-harvesting robot at Monash University in Australia. Hugh Zhou is lead author of an analysis of AI progress in fruit-harvesting robots and their commercial viability. A recent study reviewed nearly 50 harvesting robot projects from 2000 to 2020 and found that harvesting robots have yet to see widespread use, in large part because most robots still can’t do a better job than a human.

Instead it grabs strawberries by the stem, pulling strongly enough to detach the fruit but lightly enough to avoid damaging the rest of the plant. Rhee said Traptic stood out from other companies in the space because its robot doesn’t touch the strawberry.

Mazooma fruit machine