Designing a gripper for things that bruise

What strawberries taught us about compliance, speed and failure modes. At Kineta we spend most of our time in the gap between a convincing lab demo and a robot that works on a Tuesday night shift.

What we learned

The hardest problems were rarely the ones we predicted. Lighting changed, packaging changed, people changed how they worked around the robot — and each change was a chance to make the system more robust rather than more brittle.

Where we go next

We are publishing our evaluation set and inviting partners to break it. If you have a task our robots can’t do yet, we would love to hear about it.