Recognizing defeat is not easy. But in the end, the fruits of meticulous work were, alas, far from perfect.

It's about the Japanese corporation Panasonic. For a long time, the developers of the company created a special robot that will help farmers collect a large crop of tomatoes. The presentation of this mechanism promised to be impressive. But, alas, it all ended in shame and disappointment.

The robotics laboratory invited journalists to get acquainted with the unique "tomato robot". The meeting was timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Panasonic and promised to truly surprise. The emphasis was on the robot, which, according to the scientists, should be the ideal assistant for collecting tomatoes from the fields.

During the demonstration of his abilities, the robot really surprised, but the surprise was a failure: picking tomatoes, the mechanism constantly dropped the fruits on the floor. According to the developers, the cyber assistant was supposed to stack the tomatoes in neat rows. However, instead, the tomatoes deformed during the fall had to be picked up by the company employees behind the robot.

“But after all, more than one million dollars was spent on these developments,” journalists later wrote in their devastating articles.

Before proceeding to the description of the remaining miscalculations, we add that the robotic collector is equipped with two cameras of the Panasonic Lumix series. Using the first, the robot reads the color of the fruit. The second determines ripeness. Having found a tomato suitable for assembly, the cyber-collector must carefully pick it from the branch and put it in a special tray. Also, the robot can move along the floor or special rails between the beds. And the processor of the mechanism is equipped with artificial intelligence for the analysis of information received from cameras. The robot memory database contains more than ten thousand images of tomatoes. Based on these images, the robot learned to recognize ripe fruits.

However, the expectations of the developers did not materialize. The robot turned out to be too slow and put only ten tomatoes per hour in the tray. “And despite the fact that he managed to pluck tomatoes literally every ten seconds,” representatives of the media lamented. “But the robot simply dropped most of the fruit to the floor.”

Having plucked about 180 tomatoes from the branches per hour of work, the robot proved how helpless and useless it is in comparison with people (an experienced tomato harvester can collect an average of 800 fruits in one hour).

“We had a lot of fun watching the robot throw tomatoes on the floor instead of lowering them into the tray,” witnessed the cybernetic failure ironically. However, this does not upset the developers. They are sure that their grief-robot can still be useful on tomato beds:

“We will eliminate miscalculations, we will improve the mechanism. And our robot will certainly become a good helper for people who go on a break, on vacation or on weekends. Moreover, a person cannot work day and night, collecting tomatoes from the fields. And our robot is ready to work at least all week and will never ask for lunch. ”