Picking fruit and vegetables, once a labour-intensive process, has long been fingered among the sectors where job losses to robots were seen as likely. — Photo by Lewis Wilson on Unsplash
BERLIN: In what could be a further sign of job losses to come amid the rise in AI-powered robotics, a Dutch-Swiss team has come up with a tomato-picking robot with the help of ChatGPT.
Researchers at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and the Lausanne-based technical university EPFL said the artificial intelligence chatbot came up with a range of ideas and suggestions during the process, including what kind of robot they should go about putting together.
“We wanted ChatGPT to design not just a robot, but one that is actually useful,” said Cosimio Della Santina of TU Delft.
The team in the end chose to home in on food supply, saying that “as they chatted with ChatGPT, they came up with the idea of creating a tomato-harvesting robot.”
The researchers said they kept to “all of ChatGPT’s design decisions” which, they added, “proved particularly valuable in the conceptual phase.”
“ChatGPT extends the designer’s knowledge to other areas of expertise. For example, the chat robot taught us which crop would be most economically valuable to automate,” said Francesco Stella, also of TU Delft.
Growing tomatoes is big business in The Netherlands, with exports of the fruit generating almost US$2bil (RM9.22bil) for the nation in 2021. Picking fruit and vegetables, once a labour-intensive process, has long been fingered among the sectors where job losses to robots were seen as likely.
ChatGPT also came up with useful suggestions during the implementation phase: “Make the gripper out of silicone or rubber to avoid crushing tomatoes” and “a Dynamixel motor is the best way to drive the robot” were among the tips it threw out to the team.
The result of this human-AI tie-up? “A robotic arm that can harvest tomatoes,” the researchers said, ahead of writing up their of the process for the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. – dpa
