They are very clearly not. Humans are good at some things, like recognizing fruit in clusters. Robots are good at different things. Shifting from easy for a human to harvest to easy for a robot to harvest is both in theory and practice a radical change.
But the same things benefit both. And often "human" harvesting just means humans driving farm equipment, which are now basically totally automated.
Things like growing crops in rows. Things like grape vines being trained into rows. Things like nut trees bred so they shed their nuts when shaken by a mechanical shaker.
These things are the same, it's just how automated we go.
I've spent over a decade in the agtech/robotics space here in Norcal and everyone seems to have an opinion, until you actually go out to where our food is grown and find out it's already highly automated, robotic, etc. It's just not sexy in the VC tech way we need it to be to be cool to talk about.
Go to a modern farm, see how intertwined tech, farming, biology, all is. It didn't get this way overnight.
Put another way. What improvements to plants to benefit human harvestability can you think of wouldn't also improve robotic harvestability?
> What improvements to plants to benefit human harvestability can you think of wouldn't also improve robotic harvestability?
I could be totally wrong about this, but the first thing that occurs to me would be something like inconsistent polyploidalism in something like strawberries. It makes larger fruits that are easier to spot and visually recognize, easier to grasp for human hands, but their inconsistent sizes and shapes could mean that they are less able to be "machineable".
It seems like growing strawberries that are more likely to be of consistent size / shape would be better for machineability -- even if it means the average fruit size is smaller.
Kindof like when my son raised chickens for 4H -- he wasn't graded on the size of his largest chickens, but rather whether or not he could grow a flock of chickens that were all consistent in size / weight.
Edited to add the in practice part.