Robots my someday replace humans for picking delicate fruits and vegetables. Photo: Paul Wooton

Can robots roll up their sleeves and pick fruit? Vision Robotics, a company in San Diego, thinks so. It’s building scouting robots that use multiple stereo cameras to locate and size the fruit in the trees. The ’bots beam that info to robotic fruit pickers that look like mechanized octopuses on tank treads with long harvesting arms that gently pluck the produce. For now, the speed and accuracy of the machines still lag behind their human counterparts, and they still cost far more to employ.

We’ve written previously about skyscraper farms with vertical gardens yielding produce. I suppose robots would be required to farm those urban gardens. How do you feel about robots replacing human farmhands?

via Popular Science