Hours spent toiling away under the beating sun to harvest berries and fruit may soon be a thing of the past as robots look set to replace humans in the field.

A £700,000 machine built by the University of Plymouth has succeeded in plucking a raspberry from a plant and carefully placing it in a punnet.

The painstaking process takes a whole minute to get one berry because it requires a combination of soft robotics, clever AI and ‘deep learning’.