exactly. In large fruit packing lines if the plant came to a stop, it would cost a lot of $s per minute of downtime (some lines involved 100s of people, incomi

exactly. In large fruit packing lines if the plant came to a stop, it would cost a lot of $s per minute of downtime (some lines involved 100s of people, incoming trucks, out going trucks etc that all get frozen). Some crops are very time sensitive and delays in the whole supply chain are problematic. Though the good thing with free form robots like that is you can buy a certain amount of redundancy. Some problems though are disastrous, like if the robot starts automatically destroying the lettuces for some reason (unforeseen mechanical failure which is undetected). I have watched this happen a number of times with the automated machines I worked on..... nothing quite like debugging problems with that kind of pressure :)