Raspberry-picking MACHINES will replace dwindling numbers of migrant farm workers

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 takes a whole minute to get one berry because 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. 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.