The Robot That Holds the Camera in Surgery
Deniz spends a day at an Ankara hospital where a robot steadies the camera during keyhole surgery, and asks the surgeon and the engineer what the machine really does.
Picking a Strawberry Without Bruising It
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Show notes
The strawberry gripper
Picking a strawberry is easy for a human and brutally hard for a machine: the fruit bruises, the stem hides, the light changes. Deniz spends a night shift in a greenhouse near Antalya with a picking robot and the team that built it, and a morning with the human pickers.
- Why cameras alone could not find the ripe fruit
- A soft gripper that took three years and 40 prototypes
- How fast the robot picks compared with a person, honestly
- What the day-shift pickers think of their night-shift colleague
- Explainer: what a soft robotic gripper actually is
Recorded on site with the greenhouse running.
Transcript
Merhaba and welcome to Servo and Sense, I am Deniz Aksoy. This is the show that goes to where the robots actually are, and this time it is a strawberry greenhouse near Antalya at two in the morning. There is a robot in there, rolling slowly along the rows, looking for ripe fruit and picking it without leaving a mark. That sentence took the engineers three years and forty gripper prototypes, and they will tell you why. In the morning I sat with the human pickers who work the day shift, and their opinion of the night-shift robot is more interesting than any press release. At the end, a short explainer on soft grippers. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let's go into the greenhouse.
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