A bowl of salad is a beautiful collection of human ingenuity. The lettuce requires its own specialized agricultural process, as do the tomatoes, as do the garbanzo beans. Then comes the simple act of pulling these ingredients out of the ground, a challenge our dextrous human hands complete with ease. As for robots? Not so much.

This is why roboticists are creating crop-specific machines to harvest fruits and veggies. There’s the robot that harvests lettuce with a knife made of water. Now comes the apple-picking robot, a metallic farmer that just graduated from R&D and won a job in a New Zealand orchard. Its deployment may be limited at the moment, sure, but it’s a glimpse at a future in which hyper-specialized robots help feed our growing species.

The robot (it’s thus far nameless, in case you were wondering), developed by a company called Abundant Robotics, navigates the rows between apple trees using lidar, which paints the world with lasers, and images the fruits with machine vision.

“In real time it’s recognizing apples,” says Dan Steere, CEO of Abundant. “If they're ripe, then the computer system sequences them for the robotic arm to pick.” Or maybe not so much pick as slurp—the arm uses a vacuum tube to suck the delicate fruit off the plant. The apple then hits a conveyor, which ferries it into a bin. The robot can do this 24 hours a day, scooting up and down the rows of the orchard, skipping not-quite-ripe fruits to return to later, as a human picker would.

Abundant Robotics' apple picker works on specially adapted apple trees that grow low and flat, almost like grape vines. Abundant Robotics

There are many logical and technical reasons why an apple-picking robot hasn’t existed until now. When it comes to the evolution of agricultural automation, it’s been more machete than shears. Some of the machines in widespread use are the combine, which harvests the whole wheat plant, and cotton pickers, which sweep across acreage, stripping the plants of their fluffy fruit. Apple trees, on the other hand, are, well, trees, and they can’t just be steamrolled for harvest. “You can't damage the trees, and you can't damage the fruit,” says Steere. “And so that’s just more difficult to do than something like a combine for wheat, where you mow the crop down and pull it through a machine.”

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What has now made automation possible for apples comes down largely to the sensing—this robot not only pinpoints the fruits but determines their ripeness too. Operators can adapt it for a particular variety of apple by consulting with the farmer, who knows from experience what color equals ripe. Abundant Robotics can then tweak the vision system accordingly.