Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
65 comments
·July 28, 2025ortusdux
UncleOxidant
Yes, this. There's a certain way that ripe blakcberries (and raspberries) feel and pull away from the plant. After a while you just sort of understand the tactile sense of ripeness. So while this might pick blackberries without damaging them, I doubt they're going to be peak ripeness. Blackberries don't continue to ripen after they're picked so it's not like tomatoes where they can pick them kind of green and they ripen up by the time they hit the store.
dmurray
For blackberries at home or in hedgerows, picking only the black ones has always been good enough for me. For raspberries, it's important that they come off the stem readily.
Maybe commercial pickers need to optimise differently and could pick every day and get every berry at its absolute peak? But I doubt that's the state of the art with human pickers at the moment: they get paid minimum wage and are assessed primarily on the weight they pick.
01100011
Yeah but are there other, sensor based approaches that would also work? Ripe berries are softer, so sonic/ultrasonic waves would propagate differently. Is there a wavelength of light which behaves differently? Can shaking the branch and observing the motion of the berry provide a clue?
skeezyboy
im pretty sure you can determine ripeness solely from the colour of the fruit for most fruits, no?
RataNova
I'm curious if they could combine the force sensors with some kind of micro-movement feedback
helltone
Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product.
- demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world.
- no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans.
- no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and repair costs
bob1029
> no regards for economics
This is the #1 killer every time.
You will always find the most efficient farm machinery to be the least human-like in its design principles. The more it looks like something out of Mad Max the better.
Unless we come up with a machine like the combine harvester for blackberries, no one is going to be interested.
9rx
> You will always find the most efficient farm machinery to be the least human-like in its design principles [...] the combine harvester
Oh? I find my human-based process for separating grain to be of the very same principles as the combine. The specific mechanics aren't exactly the same. For example a combine has a fan, while I have lungs. But the principle — using airflow to aid in separation — is the same.
The sprayer is the only piece of equipment on my farm I can think of that employs a different principle to do the job as compared to how I would do the job by hand.
Loughla
>Unless we come up with a machine like the combine harvester for blackberries, no one is going to be interested.
Good news! https://airharvesters.com/
Clarkson's farm taught me that this is already a thing.
Animats
There are several kinds of blueberry picking machines. There are air-blast pickers that blow the berries off the plant. There are ones with wheels of vibrating sticks. There are ones that get a comb around the plant and pull.
Some berries get damaged, yes. Some leaves and twigs get through. They're separated out by a very fast vision-based sorting machine before packing.[1] That's been standard technology for a decade or so.
Apple picking is still in the R&D stage.[2] Cost needs to come down to $0.02 per pick.
It's great to see startups in this area, but the thing has to work. There are too many failed ag robotics startups.[3] Ask "could you pressure-wash this thing"? If there are wires, electronics, and bearings exposed, it's still experimental.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ica3FLAvPas
[2] https://goodfruit.com/lots-of-bots-video
[3] https://www.futurefarming.com/tech-in-focus/field-robots/cha...
baxtr
I am not an "AI will kill all jobs" fan at all.
Although when it comes to precedents, "robots" have (luckily) taken many jobs in agriculture already.
RataNova
Yeah, this is the classic robotics hype cycle
EA-3167
This is a classic example of University press releases, you learn to recognize the pattern. Someone who's skill set is PR gets a dumbed-down version of the science, and then converts that into a hype piece that ignores reality in favor of vague statements.
If you want the essence of this technique look at any university press release about fusion technology.
PaulHoule
... and if you ask them "got RSS?" they're the least likely to respond.
ghostly_s
The quote from the researcher is that one "could [hypothetically] design something that is better than the human hand for that one specific task," which gets turned into "some day this specific device could be better" in the prose, which becomes a suggestion that hey, maybe it already is better! in the headline. Everything published by a Uni PR department is a puff piece, frankly I don't know why they're even allowed here.
YeGoblynQueenne
I agree, we should not allow PR puff pieces by universities, or by technology companies, either.
FirmwareBurner
>Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product.
There's no incentive for the capital class to massively invest in fruit picking robotics when there are tens of millions of exploitable humans on the planet that you can use do the same job for dirt cheap.
The economic balance needs to change for change to happen.
That's why the capital class is overinvesting in AI, because that can potentially replace the higher paid jobs where the labor has leverage and turn them into similarly exploitable workers.
01100011
Well the economics of farm labor seem to be changing dramatically now, so maybe formerly expensive methods become profitable?
ggillas
Selective plant breeding and robotics pickers are the way forward here. University of Arkansas is the holder of multiple plant patents for better blackberries. New varieties are bred for many, many traits (sweetness, transport, shelf quality, ripening window, etc.)
Prof John Clark likely has invented the berries you've ate: https://news.uark.edu/articles/63163/arkansas-fruit-breeder-...
Harvest costs for fruit are an incredibly important consideration for farms and out of the thousands of potential fruits you could eat, the commercial winners have to be profitable.
There are some awesome opportunities for robotics, computer vision, and ML in agriculture. And if you can reduce harvest costs by 75% like this approach for blueberries, farmers have more market options to select better flavor qualities because the harvest quality goes up: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/impact/innovative-harvest-...
liawsjt
There doesn't appear to be anything unique about this particular soft gripper. This blog post is incredibly speculative and really based on nothing more than the author imagining that a grad student's prototype could some day be a single part in a vastly more complex system. There are entire companies that have spent tens of millions of dollars and man-centuries of work trying to pick only strawberries, and strawberries are a lot more durable than blackberries. Vision, motion planning, and controls are all significantly more difficult than gripper design.
ugh123
The authors didn't test if the robot hand can harvest better than human. They said it "could one day".
They have not even developed the piece that finds and positions the hand.
>Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
dfltr
> ...and farm labor has been limited in recent years.
"Train routes across Germany have been a bit congested recently."
YeGoblynQueenne
One day, maybe but not yet. From the article:
>> Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
Note also that there are no photos of the robot. I think that's because it hasn't even been built yet, let alone deployed.
RataNova
A soft robot hand using guitar strings as tendons to gently pick blackberries is peak 2025 energy. What stands out is the attention to biomimicry and actual force data from human pickers... that’s not just automation, it’s skill replication.
autoexec
robots could do a lot of things better than humans... if the robots actually existed... and the problems/bugs/limitations were all worked out... and they had ready access to enough power to do the job... and they were affordable enough for anyone to bother... etc.
It's nice to dream about stuff we could maybe one day have I guess...
null
dmoy
I would settle for a robot that can kill blackberry bushes. Blackberries cut me so much, every time I go do maintenance on another noxious weed, English ivy which is busy killing all my trees
RataNova
But… blackberry bushes are the good kind of invasive!
blibble
I think that's called a goat
or a pig
dmoy
I would totally put a goat back there if I was able to. Probably would have to own the goat though because it'd just come back every few months.
jahewson
I’m yet to see ivy kill a tree. I don’t get why people think this happens. It can certainly make them look ugly though.
dmoy
I've seen it and then seen the resulting dead tree fall on my house. Tree was already dead from ivy by the time I bought it. When I finally went back to cut it out, the biggest ivy were like 14cm diameter or bigger.
jahewson
This is what I mean. Maybe the tree was just dead? How do you know the ivy caused that?
claudiulodro
I’ve seen it a bunch of times, but it’s almost always because the accumulated weight and size of the ivy makes the tree fall over in a good storm
Fomite
But can it harvest blackberries cheaper than humans?
whynotmaybe
Always the question I ask myself when I see the videos of pakistanis/indians building stuff with a huge workforce when the same are built in North America with very few people and a lot of automation.
We need a new law that merges baumol's cost disease and wright's law.
bendigedig
And is it going to harvest the free blackberries I'm enjoying when I go on a walk?
I don't think so.
PaulHoule
I got schooled about the berries I pick on walks
RataNova
Farms don't run on novelty, they run on margins
Having filled my share of blackberry flats, the first part of the picking motion is a ripeness check. You want the berry to be firm with a bit of give, and you want it to pull free from the plant easily. The force feedback sensors mentioned here seems to be for training purposes, but they would probably be better used on the finished grabbers to detect ripeness.