Latest / The Robotics Podcast with Fexingo: Autonomous Systems, Industrial Robots, and Hardware
Why Robot Arms Can't Handle an Overripe Tomato
Episode 114 of The Robotics Podcast dives into a deceptively simple challenge: picking up an overripe tomato without crushing it. Lucas and Luna explore why soft, deformable objects remain a nightmare for robotic grippers, even with advanced tactile sensors and machine learning. They dissect a 2025 study from MIT's CSAIL lab that benchmarked 12 commercial grippers on tomatoes at different ripeness levels, only to find that the best success rate was 47 percent. The conversation touches on the fundamental physics of grasp stability, the limits of current force-feedback algorithms, and why…
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