Tech for Good: Building robots that generate recipes and harvest berries

At Hong Kong’s O·PARK1, 200 tons of food waste gets processed every day through a process known as anaerobic digestion. The waste is also converted into biogas which can produce 14 million kilowatt hours of surplus electricity each year. That’s enough to power 3,000 households and the entire facility. High-tech innovation is preventing food waste from ending up in landfills and generating a sustainable source of energy. That same ethos is also driving researchers to assist in our food systems… through robotics. CNN’s Tech For Good meets 30-year-old assistant professor Josie Hughes who set up the Computational Robot Design & Fabrication Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, which focuses primarily on building robotics for food and agricultural applications. Whether the robots employ ’embodied mechanics’ to harvest raspberries during the short harvest period or are equipped with sensory coordination to detect and map salt levels in a dish, the Cambridge graduate is on a mission to show how robotics can play a role in our everyday lives, particularly when it comes to food.

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