By Joe Pinkstone For Mailonline
Published: 14:00 BST, 27 May 2019 | Updated: 14:01 BST, 27 May 2019
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Hours spent toiling away under the beating sun to harvest berries and fruit may soon be a thing of the past as robots look set to replace humans in the field.
A £700,000 machine built by the University of Plymouth has succeeded in plucking a raspberry from a plant and carefully placing it in a punnet.
The painstaking process took a whole minute to get one berry as it requires a combination of soft robotics, clever AI and 'deep learning'.
It stands around six foot tall (1.8metres) and will combat a continued drop in the amount of migrant farm workers available for the arduous harvests.
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A £700,000 machine built by the University of Plymouth and spin-off firm Fieldwork Robotics has succeeded in plucking a raspberry from a plant and carefully placing it in a punnet (pictured)
Fieldwork Robotics, a spin-off from the university dedicated to agricultural robots, built the machine and says it will be able to pick 25,000 fruits a day in the future.
This will make it more efficient than human workers who manage approximately 15,000 in an eight-hour shift, according to the company.
Brexit uncertainty has seen the number of migrant workers plummet, leaving farmers scrabbling to get their yield.
The technology is also hoped to be adapted to more crops in future, with the company also developing robots to pick cauliflower, for example (pictured)
Farmers in Cornwall testing a machine last year that picks cauliflowers (pictured) from the field without bruising them. It works in a similar way to the human hand by squeezing each cauliflower before deciding whether it is ready to be
