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> A better question is why we still have food warehouses that would be better operated by robots than people. One reason is because not all fresh goods (e.g. p
by yock 10y ago
> A better question is why we still have food warehouses that would be better operated by robots than people.
One reason is because not all fresh goods (e.g. produce and meat) are created equal. Hand selection of those items is part of getting the most value our of your food dollars. You can likely overcome many of the other issues; price comparison, new product discovery, etc.; but you're still left with the inconsistency of items that come from dirt.
- zanny 10y agoSounds like a computer vision problem. The heuristics of judging the quality of most foods doesn't seem that prohibitive - coloration and geometric consistency puts you about 99% of the way there.
- unclenoriega 10y agoI'm sure if you build this system at a price cheaper than human labor and at least as good, people will buy it.
- ghaff 10y agoNot everything is a computer problem. It's more of an economic issue. You can deliver hand-picked only premium goods but it will cost. High quality food delivery is certainly possible. From what I've seen of Instacart delivering from Whole Foods, it works pretty well. But it's a premium service and isn't available where I live.
- sli 10y agoAdditionally, the problem gets a lot more complex if you're doing something like buying produce slightly less than ripe for use in two or three days. That introduces a considerably larger spectrum of criteria across all available produce. I'm not going to say it's necessarily more complicated of a problem -- I chose the word "complex" purposely -- as it mostly just simplifies down to being more training data for the AI produce picker (or what have you), but it sure seems like the failure rate would scale up rather quickly in real world scenarios. That would just lead to waste we wouldn't otherwise have. Or maybe I just prefer to pick out my own produce. It could go either way, CV isn't my field. Either way, handling pantry goods in this way doesn't sound particularly unreasonable.
- djtriptych 10y agoI agree with this. But we should have lots of hyperlocal produce / butchers, not enormous food warehouses which are 90% dry goods.
- yock 10y agoIdeally, yes, and while in my small city of Dayton, Ohio I have limited options for produce close to home my local meat producers aren't at all close to me. It's certainly not a stop on my way home. They're setup more for people with chest freezers buying half a cow at a discount to have meat for months at a time. We're just not the agrarian society that would be conducive to providing "hyperlocal produce / butchers".
- ghaff 10y ago>hyperlocal produce You do realize that many places have these things called seasons? I do have a farm stand just down the road from me which has excellent (albeit a limited range of) produce in August. January? Not so much.
- qohen 10y agoThis might help with that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_farming