Robots Start to Grasp Food Processing

Advances in robotics make it possible to automate tasks such as processing poultry and vegetables.

It is less striking than Deep Blues victory over chess champ Garry Kasparov, but Richard van der Linde says that his robotic hands mastery at picking up cabbage is something of a milestone for machines. With the aid of five cameras, plus sensors in its wrist to monitor the resistance it encounters, the three-fingered gripper can carefully pick up a cabbage, reorient it, and place it into a machine that removes the core. In industry, only humans can do that at the moment, says van der Linde.