Strawberry-picking robots that don't bruise or crush the fruit have been unveiled, promising a ‘revolution’ in harvesting soft fruit, with a workrate of 11,500 berries – between 180 and 360kg – in a 16-hour day.

Launched to coincide with Wimbledon week's famed berry consumption, the makers of the 'Rubion' robot claimed that it would take 14 of their machines less than seven days to pick and package the 34,000 kilos of unblemished strawberries usually consumed by the crowd at the tennis tournament.

The 'Rubion' is a product of the EU-funded photonics innovation incubator, ACTPHAST 4.0, working with OCTINION, a research and development company specialising in providing robotic solutions to agriculture and food, and is based on technology that allows the machine to analyse the colour of each fruit, and assess whether it is ready for picking with its delicate clasping mechanism, all within a five second picking cycle.

According to the development team, an enthusiastic and experienced human picker can collect around 50 kilograms in a day but will need to take breaks, be prepared to work for very little and can be tempted to eat some of the berries. But the automated picking of berries has always suffered from drawbacks owing to the delicate nature of the fruit.

CEO and founder Dr Tom Coen explained: “The picking of soft fruits with machines has always been tricky given that they are so easy to get squashed and the sensitivity needed to discern whether a fruit was ripe or rotten, simply wasn’t there.

“However, Rubion, our autonomous strawberry-picking robot, is a novel way around this problem. It is comparable to a human in many ways: the robot only picks the finest fresh, red berries and will not bruise or hurt the strawberries in any way.”

The picking and sorting speeds are claimed to be comparable to the 'ideal' human picker, but with advanced quality monitoring and the ability to work without a rest or a break, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Co-founder of Octinion, Dr Jan Anthonis said:“Our robot doesn’t need a break or a holiday and doesn’t complain about the weather. Rotting and unpicked fruit from a lack of human pickers on farms all over the world could soon be tackled with robots.”

Rubion uses photonic sensors to detect the wavelengths of light, or the ‘signatures’ given off from a ripe, red strawberry according to a pre-programmed set of characteristics the RGB camera built into the ‘eye’ of the robot.

“Just like you know what a plump, juicy red strawberry looks like,” said Anthonis, “Rubion can do this mathematically, first looking for the infrared spectroscopic heat signatures given off from a fruit, getting a perfect ‘hit’ every time.

“The arm has our very own patented ‘soft touch gripper’ that doesn't do any more damage to the strawberries than a human would. It picks the strawberry literally like a person without cutting or burning the stem, but by actually picking a berry.”