Field-evaluated Closed Structure Soft Gripper Enhances the Shelf Life of Harvested Blackberries

Soft robotic grippers are intrinsically delicate while grasping objects, and can rely on mechanical deformation to adapt to different shapes without explicit control. These characteristics are particularly appealing for agriculture, where items of produce from the same crop can vary significantly in shape and size, and delicate harvesting is among the first concerns for fruit quality. Various soft robotic grippers have been proposed for harvesting different produce types, however their employment in field testing has been extremely limited. In this paper we developed the first closed structure soft gripper for the harvest of blackberries. We adapted an existing gripper concept, initially testing it on a sensorised raspberry physical twin. Then, followed grower-guided protocols to pick blackberries in farm polytunnels, and to evaluate the shelf life in comparison with berries picked by professional human pickers. Our results with ten experimental varieties showed a picking success rate of 95.4% demonstrating the capability of a closed structure gripper to adapt mechanically to fruit-shape variability. Moreover, a shelf life assessment on seven measured traits reported greatly improved shelf life of between 30 and 150%, across all traits for gripper harvested blackberries. Our study demonstrates the potential of soft grippers for delicate fruit harvesting, and indicates how to increase the impact of robotics in agriculture.