A robot farmer has been created in Britain: it can collect up to 220 kg of berries in a day (video)

The robot farmer is able to distinguish between the ripeness of fruits, signs of diseases of a certain crop, and also conducts an initial screening of the harvested crop for damage and other factors.

British companies have begun to actively test new capabilities of robot farmers that collect berries of different crops. This is reported by the Metro.

The media indicates that the DogTooth robot has built-in AI and computer vision, is able to distinguish between ripe fruits and report signs of crop diseases. The machine also carefully picks the fruit – it does not grab the fruit itself, but carefully cuts off the stem of the fruit to avoid defects and infection with mold and fungus.

In addition, the robot carries out automated quality control of the harvested crop. It is the machine that, based on programmed parameters, selects suitable fruits that can be provided to suppliers.

The company's CEO, Dr. Duncan Robertson, says that the technology has two goals – to help overcome the labor shortage due to Brexit and the pandemic, and to minimize the effects of the anthropogenic factor on the quality of the crop. If earlier farmers relied on migrants to harvest crops, now many are thinking about automating these processes.

“Of course, at first the appearance of robots will lead to an increase in expenses for farmers, but this will not lead to an increase in prices. Previously, it was problematic to even automate such tasks as picking fruits and berries, in particular tomatoes, strawberries, apples and raspberries. However, the situation is gradually changing for the better,” – says Dr. Robertson.

Journalists indicate that currently about 70 machines from the DogTooth company are used by British farmers. The largest harvest record is one of the strawberry harvests – then a group of robot farmers was able to collect almost 220 kg within 24 hours without human intervention. According to the developers' calculations, it will take a group of workers almost four times longer to collect the same amount of material.