42.机器人采摘草莓Robots Harvest Strawberry

Strawberry is good to eat but hard to pick. Consumers are often unaware of the toil(艰辛) and sacrifice of the workers that goes into each box of strawberries. Now Huan Bravo created a robot that can gently harvest strawberries using sensors（传感器） and cameras.
It analyzes each berry's ripeness（成熟度）, and programs the movement of a robotic arm to snip the stem（根茎） without disturbing the plant's less ripe fruit.
Strawberries ripe from the bottom to the top, so the tip of the bottom becomes red while the the other part of the strawberry is still green and is going up.
So his team members measure what part of the strawberry is in red and what is still remaining in green. They typically want about 90% red and 10% green that is a perfect moment for harvest.
On average the robot cuts one berry every 10 seconds.
Over the course of 3 days the machine can harvest eight hectares（公顷） of strawberries without touching the skin of the strawberry. This way the surface is not going to be contaminated（被污染） by virus or whatever.
Automated（自动化的） harvesting is augmented（增强） by agro（农业的） robot bug vacuum（吸尘器）,which is literally sucking out pests from the bushes without harming the berries or using pesticides（杀虫剂）.
The robots do not get hot or tired but they are not taking jobs from humans.
"As an industry we are short on people.
It's not a matter of displacing（取代） people.
It's a matter of filling in the holes and the gaps to where we don't have enough people to do the jobs."
Conroy says he is looking forward to modified（修正后的） agro robots helping to harvest other crops as well.

exerpted from VOA