I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland.
Heirloom tomatoes look like a topology project gone horribly wrong, and the colors aren't found in any Pantone catalog. They are also the most delicious.
There's definitely a place for both. We have to get ketchup ingredients from somewhere, and gourmands will always want the ugly heirlooms.
> I can see an automated tomato picker working well for tomato varieties that are uniform and grow on largely uniform plants. But those tomatoes are bland.
Throughout history, our main trick when solving a problem with technology was to constrain the problem to something that's much easier to solve, by changing the environment.
For example, all-terrain mechanized transport is hard, and to this day, nobody except hobbyists and militaries even bothers to try tackling it. Our solution was to flatten the terrain into roads, so that we could just use wheels. We've been iterating on that idea ever since.
I wouldn’t know whether their claims hold water, but http://www.automatorobotics.com/autonomous-single-tomato-har...:
A robot that can reliably detect ripe tomatoes and harvest them with consistent quality at a rate of 10-12 tomatoes per minute.
[…]
reducing the harvest costs by 50%
(The videos give me the impression that “10-12 tomatoes per minute” is best-case)