A MAJOR online supermarket, which has a large warehouse in Hampshire, is testing a soft robotic hand that can pick fruit and vegetables without damaging them.

Ocado is trialling the prototype which it hopes can one day be used at its already highly automated Walworth Business Park site.

The grocer’s automated warehouse already has robots which select crates containing specific items that make up customer orders. They are currently brought over to a human team for selection but, in future, the hand could replace them.

Also in development is a humanoid maintenance robot called SecondHands.

It will work alongside a human colleague to maintain the warehouse.

The fruit and vegetable picker is part of a fiveyear EU-funded collaboration between five European universities and Disney called SoMa (Soft Manipulation).

This includes researchers, academics and scientists from the University of Pisa, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR, the German aerospace agency), the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and Disney Research Zürich.

Dr. Graham Deacon, robotics research team leader at Ocado Technology, said: “Ocado and its academic partners are developing some of the most innovative technologies in the field of robotics.

With SoMa, we are pursuing a new direction for robotic grasping by developing robot hands that can safely pick easily damageable items such as fruits and vegetables.

“The RBO Hand 2 designed by the Technische Universität Berlin offers a versatile, cost-effective and safe solution for robotic grasping and manipulation that integrates very well with Ocado’s highly-automated warehouse retail solutions.”

At the moment, only the gripper is being demonstrated.

However the firm hope the robot will learn to distinguish fruit ripeness through machine learning. It will also be able to pick other items which require different care - such as wine bottles and detergent.