摘草莓机器人惊艳亮相

Strawberry-picking robots could collect enough fruit to supply tennis-lovers at Wimbledon for one week.

The Rubion is programmed to only pick perfect strawberries, with just 14 machines being able to gather enough to keep the tournament topped up for seven days. Its clasping mechanism, which leaves the fruit bruise-free, picks and packages a strawberry every five seconds, resulting in up to 360 kilograms of the berries a day.

Rubion even has a built-in “camera” using sensors to spot only the ripest fruit.

Wimbledon kicked off last Monday, with fans being expected to consume a whopping 34,000 kilograms of strawberries over the two-week tournament.

Even the most enthusiastic fruit picker can only manage around 50 kilograms a day. The Belgium-based manufacturer ACTPHAST 4.0, which specializes in providing robotic solutions to agriculture and food, has therefore launched Rubion.

ACTPHAST’s founder and CEO Tom Coen said: “The picking of soft fruits with machines has always been tricky given that they are so easy to get squashed and the sensitivity needed to discern whether a fruit was ripe or rotten, simply wasn’t there. However, Rubion, our autonomous strawberry-picking robot, is a novel way around this problem.”

Rubion works at a rate of around 11,500 berries over 16 hours. (SD-Agencies)