In 2015 a roboticist started to make a list of which crops a robot might be able to pick most easily. Aubergine was bottom, but which crop came out on top?
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskIn late June a small white object slowly makes its way along a field of asparagus in Gloucestershire. When it passes over a group of spears it pauses, whirrs then clunks: the asparagus has been sliced. This robot—a prototype called Sprout that is being developed by a London startup called Muddy Machines—is unprepossessing. It will not prompt bucolic poets to write odes to it, or painters to capture it resting by a hay wain.
In Gloucestershire, Mr Chinn started up his tractor. To everything in farming there is a season: a time to plant and, if you are an English farmer post-Brexit, a time to fasten a chain to the back of your vehicle and plough the crop that you have grown for the past year back into the field. The process, appositely enough, is called “harrowing” and it was, says Mr Chinn, “devastating”. A time to weep.
Harvesting is especially ripe for robotic puzzlement. Leaves confuse them; bumps baffle them; colour stymies them. In 2015 Joe Jones, a roboticist whose inventions include the Roomba, a vacuum cleaner, was considering new areas to explore, and started to make a list of which crops a robot might be able to pick most easily. He considered different variables that “would make it easy for a robot to handle” such as squidginess, colour and foliage, then scored each crop out of 12.
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