> Is this already being done?
This is, indeed, already something that is done. As I understand it, for tomatoes it's typically for canning varieties, but they're called determinate cultivars[1]. Even with those, I know in processing you still have to discard some fruits that aren't ripe.
I imagine this kind of technological solution would also be more useful when picking tomatoes for use as the fresh fruit.
See below for a couple examples:
https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-...
There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues.
If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/
for many fruits you will have never seen before.
If you wait till they are about to spoil on the vine, even the one's you really don't like will have taste
This has been happening for hundreds of years already with every food crop.
Edited to add the in practice part.
Things like growing crops in rows. Things like grape vines being trained into rows. Things like nut trees bred so they shed their nuts when shaken by a mechanical shaker.
These things are the same, it's just how automated we go.
I've spent over a decade in the agtech/robotics space here in Norcal and everyone seems to have an opinion, until you actually go out to where our food is grown and find out it's already highly automated, robotic, etc. It's just not sexy in the VC tech way we need it to be to be cool to talk about.
Go to a modern farm, see how intertwined tech, farming, biology, all is. It didn't get this way overnight.
Put another way. What improvements to plants to benefit human harvestability can you think of wouldn't also improve robotic harvestability?
I could be totally wrong about this, but the first thing that occurs to me would be something like inconsistent polyploidalism in something like strawberries. It makes larger fruits that are easier to spot and visually recognize, easier to grasp for human hands, but their inconsistent sizes and shapes could mean that they are less able to be "machineable".
It seems like growing strawberries that are more likely to be of consistent size / shape would be better for machineability -- even if it means the average fruit size is smaller.
Kindof like when my son raised chickens for 4H -- he wasn't graded on the size of his largest chickens, but rather whether or not he could grow a flock of chickens that were all consistent in size / weight.
Consistency over yield.
[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00840-2
Now, the supermarkets that sold those have solved it by breeding ones that are incredibly sweet.
At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)?
This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.
Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place.
Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?