Can robots solve farmers' difficulties in recruiting fruit pickers?
Duncan Robinson, chief executive of Dogtooth technologies discusses how fruit picking robots could help ease production problems for farmers in Kent
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00:00The key challenge from the customer perspective is to recruit enough high quality and experienced
00:22picking labour. Increasingly it's difficult to persuade young people to take temporary
00:28jobs picking fruit here in the UK and it's also difficult to find sufficiently skilled
00:35labour. Picking is not low skilled work, it needs a lot of expertise and practice.
00:41And so we think it's inevitable that robotic automation will help to fill the gap left by
00:48a shrinking workforce. We've built several generations of picking robots, our fifth
00:55generation robot is increasingly able to make a meaningful difference to the harvest requirements
01:02on the farm. It's very productive, capable of picking broadly as much fruit during the
01:08course of the day as a person.
01:25you