Agriculture
Richard Dudley imagines a world where strawberries grow in perfect rows and every day a robot army "tastes" their colors before harvesting the ripe ones. The research scientist at the United Kingdom?s National Physical Laboratory is building a robot that uses multiple wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation to identify the sweetest, ripest fruit ? then plucks it from the vine.
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Agriculture
Robot learns to pick the sweetest strawberries in UK
Richard Dudley imagines a world where strawberries grow in perfect rows and every day a robot army "tastes" their colors before harvesting the ripe ones. The research scientist at the United Kingdom?s National Physical Laboratory is building a robot that uses multiple wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation to identify the sweetest, ripest fruit ? then plucks it from the vine.Strawberries are a fickle, high-value crop, and harvesting them is costly. Lucky for Dudley, though, they can be grown in a variety of robot-picking-friendly ways. He isn?t first to the droid-worker game ? organizations in Spain, Japan, and the United States have produced tractors with gripping arms ? but all of them have the same disadvantage: They have trouble differentiating between the leaves and the fruit. Dudley?s ?bot solves this problem by analyzing the plants with a combo of micro-, radio, terahertz, and far-infrared waves.
So far, microwaves work best for strawberries. The waves find the fruit and measure its water content ? an indicator of ripeness ? effectively taking a taste test. "With microwaves, leaves are actually quite transparent," Dudley says. He describes it as a safe "x-ray eye," since actual x-rays would irradiate the crop. He hopes to work with a company that builds robotic arms to make the tech a commercial reality for farmers within a year.
Source: Fresh plaza
Published on: 8/8/2012
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Honeybees are inspiring scientists at Australia?s Vision Centre to help build a robot aircraft. Bees are able to land anywhere with amazing precision and grace, and this skill could soon be included in future aircraft. Scientists found that honeybees...
- Strawberry Cultivation In Pakistan
By Dr. Ali Muhammad Khushk and Aslam Memon Pakistan is producing a limited quantity of strawberries which are either eaten or used in preparing ice-cream, jam, jelly, pickle, cake or milk shake. The fruit fetches Rs100 to Rs120 per kg in big cities....
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Soil preparation: Prepare a weed-free site that gets 8 to 10 hours of strong sunlight a day. Well-drained soil with a pH around 6.0 to 6.2 is ideal. To avoid verticillium wilt, don't plant in sites where raspberries, strawberries, or solanaceous...
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