There are lots of barriers to automating agricultural work. The cost of robots is one and the difficulty of integrating them into supply chains is another. But a particularly big stumbling block is just how clumsy machine labor can be. That’s why new research from Cambridge University showing a robot that can peel a lettuce is a small but significant step forward.
Harvesting lettuces is time-consuming work. The vegetables grow close to the ground, have to be cut from their roots by hand, and the outer layers peeled off before packaging. There are automated solutions that help speed up this process up (one machines drops lettuce heads into bags; another cuts multiple heads at a time) but they only take care of part of the harvest. It…
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