Robots Picking Strawberries and Planting Seedlings

choi

Robots in Agriculture: Picking Strawberries and Planting Seedlings
Ilan Brat, Goodbye Field Hand, Hello Fruit-Picking Robot; Labor shortage spurs farmers to use high-tech machines for handling delicate tasks; 'They don't take break.'  Wall Street Journal, Apr 24, 2015.
www.wsj.com/articles/robots-step ... ng-roles-1429781404

Note:
(a) This report is dispatched from Oxnard, California.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxnard,_California
(in Ventura County; Henry T Oxnard, founder of today's Moorhead, Minnesota-based American Crystal Sugar Company who operated a successful sugar beet factory with his three brothers (Benjamin, James, and Robert) in Chino, California, was enticed to build a $2 million factory (in 1897))

(b) "Juan Bravo, inventor of Agrobot, the picking machine. * * * The Agrobot [with 16 arms] costs about $100,000 * * * Mr Bravo is planning a new version of his Agrobot strawberry harvester that will have 60 robotic arms, and require strawberry production on raised, hydroponic beds instead of low, dirt fields. Workers will simply sit atop the machine inspecting and packing berries that pass on a conveyor belt."

The website of Agrobot.com
www.agrobot.com/
says the following.
(i) It is headquartered at Huelva, Spain.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huelva

Phoenicians founded and called it Onoba (I fail to find its meaning). Greeks and Romans generally kept the name, with minor spelling changes. "The Arabs then called it Walbah and ruled between 712-1250."  Wikipedia
(ii) The "Products" tab in the top horizontal menu says "hydroponic growing system [is] recommended for robotic harvesting."
(iii) Also the "Products" tab states, "This [robotic] system analyzes your fruit one by one, and it is responsible for ordering cutting movements that guarantee accuracy, smoothness, and sensitivity in the strawberry treatment."

In the pulldown menu from the "Products" tab, selects "Harvesters." IN the new Web page, select the third black bar with white letters that says, "See your strawberries with AGvision ®"--and you will see what the robot sees.


(c) "Soren Bjorn, Americas unit head for Driscoll Strawberry Associates Inc, the country’s largest berry brand"

Driscoll's
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driscoll's
(headquarters is in Watsonville, California; family-owned; founded in 1904 by Joseph "Ed" Reiter and RO Driscoll)
(d) "Robots have their own drawbacks. They need maintenance and repair—Agrobot normally has 16 arms, but two were recently on the fritz."

fritz (n; origin unknown): "a state of disorder or disrepair —used in the phrase on the fritz"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fritz
(e) "The labor shortage spurred Tanimura & Antle Fresh Foods Inc, one of the country’s largest vegetable farmers, last year to buy a Spanish startup called Plant Tape, whose system transplants vegetable seedlings [romaine lettuce or celery] from greenhouse to field using strips of biodegradable material fed through a tractor-pulled planting device. * * ** two workers fed romaine-lettuce seedlings-—encased in the biodegradable strips like a belt of machine-gun bullets—into the device, which precisely cut the seedlings and drove them into the soil. The machine cruised at more than 6 miles an hour—lightning fast for a produce field."

Planttape, Inc
www.planttape.com/

Still despite the video clip in the home page, I fail to comprehend how it works.