WINNING THE WAR ON WORK:

It is less striking than Deep Blue's victory over chess champ Garry Kasparov, but Richard van der Linde says that his robotic hand's mastery at picking up cabbage is something of a milestone for machines. With the aid of five cameras, plus sensors in its wrist to monitor the resistance it encounters, the three-fingered gripper can carefully pick up a cabbage, reorient it, and place it into a machine that removes the core. "In industry, only humans can do that at the moment," says van der Linde.

His company Lacquey, based in Delft, the Netherlands, is working with FTNON, a manufacturer of food-processing equipment, to get the technology ready to go to work inside the giant chillers where today humans process cabbage, lettuce, and other produce for packaging. ­Lacquey is also testing versions for other sorts of jobs, such as packaging tomatoes, peppers, and mangoes.

The company's progress is an example of how advances in robotic manipulation technology are opening up new jobs for robots in the food-processing business. 

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