Monash University researchers have developed an apple-picking robot that displayed a better than 85 per cent success rate in field trials.

It seeks to "address chronic labour shortages Australia’s agricultural sector is experiencing brought on by COVID-19, as well as tackling the future food crisis."

“Our developed vision system can not only positively identify apples in a tree within its range in an outdoors orchard environment by means of deep learning, but also identify and categorise obstacles [for]... the "optimum trajectory for apple extraction" said research lead Dr Chao Chen.

Source: https://www.aumanufacturing.com.au/monash-researchers-develop-robot-apple-harvester