I'm actually interested in how would this actually provide better testing tomatoes. Are you suggesting it will lower the harvesting cost of tastier varieties and therefore they will make their way to your local store?
There is a story that grocery store tomatoes were bred to withstand a 13 mph impact into the truck from a harvesting machine, but lost a lot of flavor. If this picker robot can gently pick heirloom tomatoes and place them into containers without damage, I speculate that consumers would prefer the better tasting tomato.
What about transportation? I always thoughts they use these horrible rock hard tomatoes because they don't get damaged during transportation, I never really thought about picking. I was slaving 14 hour days a lot of summers picking strawberries in a foreign country and I can't recall we ever talked about the damaged during picking. The main thing was to keep the damaged ones away by either throwing or by eating them.
