Fruits of ingenuity:
Agricultural machinery maker Shibuya Seiki and the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization demonstrate a robot that can pick ripe
strawberries at the annual Auto-ID and Communication Expo at the Tokyo
Big Sight convention center Wednesday. | AFP-JIJIA robot that picks ripe strawberries while farmers sleep has been unveiled with claims it could cut workloads by two-thirds.
The device, unveiled Wednesday, can pick a piece of fruit every eight
seconds by using three cameras to determine which strawberries are
ready to pick. A mechanized arm then darts out to snip each one free and
place it into its basket.
The 2-meter robot moves on rails between rows of strawberries, which in Japan are usually grown in elevated greenhouse planters.
It “calculates the degree of ripeness from the color of the
strawberry, which it observes with two digital cameras,” said Mitsutaka
Kurita, an official at Shibuya Seiki, the developer of the machine....MORE
HT: Mish's Global economic Trend Analysis*For years machine vision was neither fish nor fowl. From iProgrammer:...There has always been a basic split in machine vision work. The
engineering approach tries to solve the problem by treating it as a
signal detection
task using standard engineering techniques. The more "soft" approach
has been to try to build systems that are more like the way humans do
things. Recently it has been this human approach that seems to have been
on top, with DNNs managing to learn to recognize important features in
sample videos.
This is very impressive and very important, but as is often the case
the engineering approach also has a trick or two up its sleeve....
