Robots gear up to march to the fields and harvest cauliflowers

The job of harvesting cauliflowers could one day be in the mechanical hands of robots thanks to a collaboration between scientists and the French canned vegetable producer Bonduelle. Fieldwork Robotics, the team behind the world's first raspberry-picking robot, is designing a machine in a three-year collaboration launched on Monday. An early prototype already exists, developed by Fieldwork's co-founder Dr Martin Stoelen, lecturer in robotics at the University of Plymouth and associate professor at the Western Norway University of Applied Science. It has a gripper and a cutter that can neatly slice off a cauliflower head. "It works in a lab environment, where we put a lot of cauliflower heads in a row," said Rui Andrês, Fieldwork's chief executive.