How does robotic handling affect soft fruit quality?

Samenvatting

In the project ‘Autonomous robots for agrifood processes’, a team of Vision+Robotics experts is studying the impact of robotic handling on the quality of soft fruits. What impact does this have and can soft grippers (really) shed a different light on this?

Most of the work on measuring impact on of robotic grippers is "robot centric". Standard methods study the forces and the mechanisms for grasping, with little focus on the product. But, fragile fresh produce is alive and can react unfavorably to these forces. So, we are flipping the perspective and measuring the changes to soft fruits in response to being grasped. While we are somewhere in the middle of this research journey, with concrete results on the way, in this article we highlight current steps to measure short as well as long-term effects of a contact between a gripper and a soft fruit.