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.

Quivering and hesitant, like a spoon-wielding toddler trying to eat soup without spilling it, the world's first raspberry-picking robot is attempting to harvest one of the fruits. After sizing it up for an age, the robot plucks the fruit with its gripping arm and gingerly deposits it into a waiting punnet. The whole process takes about a minute for a single berry. It seems like heavy going for a robot that cost £700,000 to develop but, if all goes to plan, this is the future of fruit-picking. Each robot will be able to pick more than 25,000 raspberries a day, outpacing human workers who manage about 15,000 in an eight-hour shift, according to Fieldwork Robotics, a spinout from the University of Plymouth.