The robot uprising is inevitable.
Take the world’s first raspberry-picking robot, an autonomous machine that’s in development by Fieldwork Robotics at the University of Plymouth in the UK. This fruit-picking Terminator, so to speak, was developed for £700,000 ($888,230 USD) and is expected to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day—outpacing its human counterparts who average 15,000 picked raspberries during an eight-hour shift. And, raspberries, in general, are hard to pick by human hand, thus robots have the advantage.
Robots have been changing the face of the farm industry from milking cows to weeding and planting crops. Though robots create more productivity, it’s also at the expense of migrant workers who have been doing these type of jobs for decades.
Fieldwork Robotics is developing and commercialising the work of Dr Martin Stoelen of the University of Plymouth. It has attracted strong industry interest in its robot technology to harvest soft fruit and vegetables.As at April 2019, Frontier IP Group Plc (LON:FIPP) have a 27.5% holding in Fieldwork Robotics.