Forbidding Fruit

….. industrial robots are ….. bolshiest workforce you can imagine. ….. slightest variation in their working conditions or duties, and ….. whistle will blow: they are off ….. job. That applies even to ….. task as simple (for humans) as fruit-picking. Last month ….. researchers from ….. University of Florida put ….. experimental robot picker into ….. orange groves of Catania in Sicily. It will be …. long while yet before ….. poor thing can cope.

….. two problems confront ….. fruit picker (be it hydraulic or human): recognizing ….. fruit, and harvesting it quickly and thoroughly without damaging ….. fruit or ….. tree. So far, ….. Florida team, led by Dr Roy Harrell, has solved only ….. first - and even that took some of ….. newest tricks in robotics. Their one-armed picker, which is mounted on ….. trailer, is fitted with ….. colour-television camera, ….. sonar equipment, and ….. computer to make sense of what it sees and hears.

Like ….. human eye, ….. television cameras split ….. world into ….. three primary colours: red, green and blue. It is not easy to define exactly which mixture of these colours should count as 'orange'. ….. definition must be wide enough to include most of ….. oranges on most of ….. trees, but not so wide as to encompass ….. unripe fruit or other objects in ….. vicinity. At ….. sunset, for example, when ….. light becomes redder, everything starts to appear more orange. At that stage, either harvesting has to stop or ….. definition must be recalculated.

Television only tells ….. robot in which direction to pursue its orange. To discover how far away it is, ….. machine has to rely on ….. bat-like sonar. ….. robot makes high-pitched squeaks and measures ….. time taken for its squeaks to bounce back to build up ….. orange-map. ….. map is overlaid on to ….. television image. Faced with more than one orange, ….. robot chooses ….. one nearest ….. centre of its field of view and makes ….. bee-line for it. At best, ….. Sicilian prototype picks ….. orange every three to four seconds. ….. employable machine would need to be able to sustain such ….. rate all day. It would probably have up to 12 arms, each with its own camera, sonar and computer. If such machines are to pay their way and harvest ….. profit, Dr Harrell thinks they will have to learn to pick at least 85% of ….. oranges on any given tree. At ….. moment, ….. prototype can only manage 75% of ….. fruit within its limited grasp.

The Economist (BrE)

Two New Dinosaur Species Found in Antarctica

..... two new species of ….. dinosaur, one ..... quick-moving meat-eater and ….. other - ….. giant plant-eater, have been discovered in ..... Antarctica, .... U.S. researchers said on Thursday. ….. 70 million-year-old fossils of .... carnivore would have rested for millenniums at ..... bottom of ..... Antarctic sea, while ….. remains of ....1000-foot-long herbivore were found on ....top of ....mountain. They would have lived in ....different Antarctica - one that was warm and wet, ....two teams of researchers, both funded by ….. National Science Foundation, said.

....little carnivore - about 6b feet tall - was found on .. .James Ross Island, off ....coast of ..... Antarctic Peninsula.

Not yet named, ..... animal probably floated out to ….. sea after it died and settled to ..... bottom of what was then ..... shallow area of ..... Weddell Sea, said Judd Case of St. Mary's College of California, who helped find ..... fossils. Its bones and teeth suggest it may represent ….. population of two-legged carnivores that survived in ..... Antarctic long after other predators took over elsewhere on …… globe. "For whatever reason, they were still hanging out on ..... Antarctic continent," Case said in ….. statement.

.... second team led by William hammer of Augustana College in ..... Rock island, Illinois found ..... 200 million-year-old plant-eater's fossils on ..... mountaintop 13,000 feet high near ….. Beardmore Glacier. Now known as Mt. Kirkpatrick, ..... area was once ..... soft riverbed. Hammer and colleagues were scouring ..... area for ..... fossils after having found other new species there in ..... 1990s.

…... team included Peter Braddock, ….. mountain safety guide. "I jokingly said to him, 'Keep your eyes down. Look for ….. weird things in ..... rock'," hammer said in ..... statement. "He had marked four or five things he thought were odd, including some fossilized roots. But I realized that one of these things was ..... bone: ..... part of ..... huge pelvis and ilium." ...animal would have been ..... primitive sauropod - ..... long-necked, four-legged grazer similar to ..... better known brachiosaurs. "This site is so far removed geographically from any site near its age, it's clearly ….. new dinosaur to Antarctica," hammer said. "We have so few dinosaur specimen from ….. whole continent, compared to any other place, that almost anything we find down there is new to …. .science."

Reuters, 2004.