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Robots have been replacing humans on production lines for decades. The applications that they have been used for traditionally can still be considered extremely limited. Nowadays robot technology is rapidly becoming much more sophisticated. They have advanced to the point now that in the coming decade they will replace more human jobs then the combined decades preceding it. Today's article is focused around the new Panasonic Robot capable of harvesting tomatoes.

Grocery stores and consumers only want to be picking up perfect-looking tomatoes when shopping, so it's very important to harvest each tomato without dropping or damaging it in any way. As Nikkei Technology reports, Panasonic's new robot achieves this by using a combination of a camera, range image sensor, and artificial intelligence to plan and execute the perfect cut-and-catch action.

Traditionally this has been a job that we really needed humans to accomplish because of the delicate nature of the job. Damage is not an option and what humans have been doing forever now Panasonic's robot is also able to accomplish with use of its camera, sensor and AI.

I don't know about you but this completely blows my mind. I know its just a tomato picking robot but the number of applications we previously thought robotics were not able to access is becoming smaller and smaller by the day.

Here, just get a look at this new robot so you can see what I mean:

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This robot has already been tested and shown off at the International Robot Exhibition held in early December at the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition center.

The robot clearly demonstrates in the video that it has the ability to efficiently cut each tomato, only selecting those it has assessed as soon-to-be-ripe and therefore edible.

In terms of speed, Panasonic claims it can match a human worker by harvesting 10 tomatoes every minute. If you also factor in the robot never needs a break, you can see the efficiency gains possible. However, as the video above also shows, the robot isn't perfect and can drop the tomatoes it cuts from the vine.

If this is true how low will it be until they perfect this technology and it is able to harvest 20 tomatoes per minute or 30? The fact that it can already match a human in terms of speed and quality is daunting already.

Techblogger Wrap Up

It's still unclear when an entire squadron of tomato-harvesting robots will start arriving at a farm near you but I would say its time to retool and polish up our skills a bit more even if you are in the field of knowledge work this is going to put an even bigger strain on employment options in the future as lower skilled workers will make steady efforts to become knowledge workers as well.

It seems unavoidable that in the not too distant future, we will be eating fresh tomatoes picked by AI and a robot arm.

What are your thoughts on this new robot? How long do you think until these robots are rolled out and begin their food harvesting campaign?

Thanks for dropping by @techblogger!

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Source:
Panasonic's New Robot Harvests Tomatoes as Fast as a Human - PC Magazine

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