Ten years ago, a company called Agrobot demonstrated a strawberry-harvesting robot in a field in Davis, California. Today, Agrobot's strawberry picker remains a prototype. The long wait underscores the challenge for any berry-picking robot: Identify a berry that is ripe enough to pick, grasp it firmly but without damaging the fruit, and pull hard enough to separate it from the plant without harming the plant. Agrobot CEO Juan Bravo said his company's machine can't compete with people who can pick fruit by hand and pack it into clamshells. Still, growers are looking ahead to a day when it will be hard to find people willing to stoop in the fields all day, and expensive to pay them.

Mike Salem from Udacity's Robotics Nanodegree is hosting a series of interviews with professional roboticists as part of their free online material. You can find all the interviews here. We'll be posting them regularly on Robohub.