Fruit-picking robots need a gentle touch. While a huge number of crops are harvested by machines, soft fruit like raspberries are usually collected by hand. To help robots gain the skills needed to pluck raspberries from the stem without crushing them, researchers have developed a robotic raspberry. It's a fake fruit containing a sensor which can measure and feed back on the pressures involved when both humans and robots grasp it. The idea is to allow researchers to work on developing their fruit-picking devices in the lab all year round.

Read the paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s4417...

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