Russian scientists have created a “botANNIC” robot that walks through an orchard and automatically identifies diseased and damaged fruits.
The Izvestia newspaper quoted professors at Russian universities as saying that the robot was developed by specialists at the Technical University of Scientific Research in Moscow, in cooperation with their colleagues at Tambov State Technological University, China Mining Technological University, and Moscow Higher School of Economics, reports Al-Rai daily.
Ivan Ushakov, Head of the Physics Department at Moscow Technical University for Scientific Research, said, “The botANNIC robot uses a stereo camera that works with artificial neural networks, which simulate human vision.
“The robot also classifies photographs of fruits into a few groups, according to the degree of damage and disease, through multidimensional volumetric analysis, and the classification accuracy is at least 80%,” said Alexander Devin, a professor at the Department of Mechanics and Technological Measurements at Tambov University of Technology.