The mechanical engineer builds robots for harvesting raspberries

Climate change, war and global recessions are among the factors that threaten food security and hunger.

There is no single solution. However, technology can fill in some of the gaps. Josie Hughes, a mechanical engineer, is determined to demonstrate how robotics plays a part in our daily lives. She’s particularly interested in food. The Cambridge graduate, who began building LEGO robots when she was a kid, now heads the Computational Robot Design & Fabrication Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. She is one of the youngest assistant professors to be hired by the EPFL.

Her invention, a robot that picks raspberries using artificial intelligence, can help to make farming more cost-effective and efficient, as well as solve the labor shortages in the UK, which left PS60,000,000 ($74,000,000) of fruit and vegetable rotting on fields in this summer. Hughes spoke to CNN about her research and how robots could be harvesting our next meal.

Source:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/19/world/raspberry-harvest-robot-josie-hughes-hnk-spc-intl/index.html