Jan 31, 2017
Ocado trials fruit-picking robot
The fruit and vegetable picker is part of a five-year research EU-funded collaboration between five European universities and Disney called Soma, said Ocado spokesman Alexandru Voica. "People have tried suction cups, robot hands with three fingers... What we are trying to do is to actually mimic the human hand." At the moment, only the gripper is being demonstrated but ultimately the robot will learn to distinguish fruit ripeness through machine learning. "When the customer gets their bag of bananas or tomatoes, if they see the product is damaged they don't care whether it's a human or a robot that's picked it." "A general purpose manipulator is a really tough thing to build, and certainly understanding and exploiting the way the human hand functions, because it is so flexible and adaptive, makes a lot of sense," he told the BBC. "There are lots of groups that are looking at robotic manipulation but often it is for a specific purpose - picking up a concrete block is not the same as doing artificial suturing for example - so the tendency has been to build different types of manipulators for different domains."
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