Picking soft fruit from the tree

The gap is not in the seeing but in the hand, because an apple has to be lifted and rolled off its stem without bruising it or tearing away the spur that will carry next year's fruit. The best machines take four to five seconds a fruit against a picker's one or two, and their developers are aiming at two to three. Performance depends on the orchard more than on the robot, which is why growers are rebuilding plantings as flat fruiting walls to suit machines that do not yet exist at scale. Even the stated goal leaves the last fifth of the crop to people, and soft fruit under cover, stone fruit, table grapes and anything picked over several passes for ripeness are still done entirely by hand.