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AI and Robotics in Agriculture in Japan [video]
- jawbone3 9y agoI think robots are cool, but it is a bit depressing that a big driver for their development is that the japanese want to keep immigrants out... makes me a bit hesitant to wish them luck with it.
- mc32 9y agoIt's their country and they can decide their self determination. They have no obligation to subsidize other countries' economic mismanagement. The govt and pop at large want to keep Japan Japanese. It's not a new religion. They've been that way since before cmdr Perry. I can respect that.
- puranjay 9y agoContrary to perception, open immigration is unfair to the weakest and poorest in a society. I live in India. My country has 300M people living in acute poverty - less than $1/day. These are the people who would likely benefit most from immigrating to a developed country with better healthcare and opportunities. Yet: 1. These people would be liabilities in a developed nation since they have no transferable skills apart from manual labor. Most can't even read or write. 2. In 99% of cases, these people wouldn't even know anything about immigration, refugee status, etc. Open immigration essentially helps people who already have the knowledge and means to immigrate. These are not the poorest and most in-need. The Indian immigrants moving to America or Europe can have perfectly okay lives in India. I don't begrudge them for moving, but for western people to assume a philanthropic stance for taking them in is wrong. You aren't helping the poorest; you're helping the "doing okay" segment of the population.
- ben_w 9y agoAnd interesting perspective. What do you forsee happening when tech like this replaces the labour of those currently earning less than $1/day?
- puranjay 9y agoThe agriculture sector employs nearly 55% of India's workforce. There is already enough tech to replace 90% of this labor force - simple mechanization. Yet, legal roadblocks make mechanization unfeasible in India (laws against owning farm land beyond a certain level, making mechanized farming effectively unfeasible). These roadblocks are mostly because of political reasons. Politicians know that if they were to make mechanized farming possible, they'd see massive unemployment and hence, massive loss of votes. So the same thing is going to happen to any other technological advancement that affects this massive vote bank: it will be stopped at a political level. Silicon Valley ambitions tend to fail hard when confronted with the reality of acute poverty and the kind of political situations it engenders.
- ben_w 9y agoThanks. I'm not sure if that situation is a good one or a bad one, but it's good to know about.
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoBeing able to do manual labour is still enough of a desirable skill on its own, and yes, hordes of the poor from the Indian subcontinent emigrate (albeit on a temporary contractual basis). The outflow of dirt-poor Indian farming villages to Gulf construction projects has been a phenomenon for decades now.
- puranjay 9y agoThe people emigrating aren't the poorest of the poor. The gulf workers you talk about are mostly from India's most developed state (Kerala), are educated (or at least, literate), and have access to decent healthcare. The people I'm talking about are from states where 40% of the population lives below poverty line and the literacy rate is still at 60%.
- jawbone3 9y agoWhat, you are saying that keeping people with more opportunities than the poorest in India helps them more than letting those with means emigrate and send remittances? Or do you just not care for those 300 millions of citizen?
- Banthum 9y agoI wish the West would learn from them. In Tokyo these days, you can go to a culture festival and not have to see police stationed every block with assault rifles and flak jackets. They're watching and learning from us, that's for sure.
- ben_w 9y agoVisit England some time. The UK doesn't even routinely let the police handle guns, not even pistols.
- Baeocystin 9y agoDo you think that will still be the case in the coming months? Honest question.
- otoburb 9y agoThe parent's answer will probably depend heavily on the results of the snap general UK election. Polls close today at 10PM GMT.
- ben_w 9y agoGuns are extremely unpopular in the UK, so unless something insane happens like UKIP winning outright, I expect most police will remain unarmed. In fact, even if UKIP did win outright, I doubt there are enough qualified instructors to train a significant number of police with firearms in just a few months. I think there are only about 1000 officers in the UK with firearms training at the moment.
- dhf17 9y agoWhat's wrong with that? They just want to preserve their culture, don't see a problem with that. I've spent a decent amount of time there, much of which was with locals. Despite being a white dude outsider, part of my attraction to Japan is the cultural homogeneity. I hope they can keep it up.
- stereo 9y agoThat link is borken.
- agumonkey 9y agoI often laugh about that soon miniaturization of electronics and soon mechanics too, we'll be so proud of our new little swarms of silicon insects. Then someone will have the genius idea to make them env. friendly, even biodegradable, and feed on local nutrient; and to provide self sustained optimizations, make them exchange heuristic atom that we'd call genes. Greetings, humans, welcome to nature. You just learned to speak to it. ps: I heard there were tiny leaf cutting quadcopters on the market in Europe.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI used to dislike nature because technology seemed cooler. Metal beats flesh, right? But at some point I realised this: nature is technology. It's a super-advanced nanotech that is not of our design, and which we can't control... yet. Our current solutions may seem better, but that's only because they're crude attempts at directly optimizing for narrow set of goals. Planes may be faster than birds, but they don't self-heal, self-fuel, and don't do centimetre-precision maneuvering in a complex environment. Nowadays I believe that our technology has a lot to learn and steal from nature - e.g. materials, energy-efficiency, self-replication. Better metal will look more and more like flesh.
- flor1s 9y agoIn Computer Science many innovations are bio-inspired, such as various robots (Gecko robot from Stanford: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/gecko-082410.html http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/august/gecko-082410.html, Harvard's octobot: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37169109 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37169109) and algorithms (neural networks are inspired by how the brain works, genetic algorithms are inspired by evolution). Note though that even though these robots and algorithms are inspired by biology, in terms of functionality or design they typically only play lip service to the real thing.
- agumonkey 9y agoBasically we agree. I see "tech" as anthropological hubris mostly. We overcome our own limited understanding through the ages and each time we felt great. Dismissing the beauty of everything around us. When you think about how even a fly is amazing, or an insect, so minuscule, so thin. At the end we'll only get to understand our own world and own bias. Then we may reconsider the meaning of life and our cultures.
- majewsky 9y agoCan someone summarize the submission? It just says "Video not available" for me.
- pakitan 9y agoIt's basically a PR piece for a Japanese company. Shows a spraying drone, a drone on wheels that can show you a video of how well your asparagus is growing, and a drone collecting images of onion fields, that can be analyzed by AI for detection of a specific type of fungus, with questionable accuracy. I didn't see anything that would justify the 30 minutes wasted watching the video.
- hammeiam 9y agoAgreed. All of the examples shown were basically, "and then we put a camera on this drone, isn't that cool?" I was hoping for technology at the caliber of those LED greenhouses, or at least as good as that tensorflow cucumber sorter.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yanivleven 9y agoJapan is by far the world leader in one of the most important tech revolutions in the coming decade, the robotics revolution.
- mc32 9y agoThey have been at it seriously since the 70s, so it's no surprise they are leaders in this field. That said, they've had some misses too. Poured a lot of money into money pits (their AI efforts of old, "5gen computer" for example).
- xbmcuser 9y agoThey have been doing it because they saw labour shortages in the future because of declining population they are solving a local problem. So far Japan has been the economic model many people show about what can go wrong. But the way I see it when the robot revolution comes well actually the robot revolution is already here when the ai revolution comes countries with declining and aging population will be a lot more stable than countries with young and growing population with little means to support or earn a living.
- hwillis 9y agoThat's not true. Agricultural robotics and automation are certainly more advanced in America and have improving for a long time. Drones with spectral cameras to examine and map plant health and irrigation levels, and to spot-spray pesticides, automated gps tractors and tools, collaborative augmented reality- nothing new in the US or Europe. It's said a lot, but Japanese robotics is somewhat myopic. IMO mostly it's due to the corporate structures in Japan: huge companies like Honda can pour tons of funding into ASIMO for 4 decades, but their goals are too narrow to make up for broad, investigative research. Plus, culture in Japan is a tangible force, and the awareness of societal problems is so high it actually impedes pure research. They are so focused on their aging population and the automation of labor that the large majority of research is geared towards those problems in one way or another. The US has the same problem- we focus on military use over everything else, but we do it just a little less than Japan. You typically hear this sentiment (Japan is the best at robotics) wrt humanoid robotics, especially ASIMO[1]. ASIMO is basically just a really smooth suite of soft skills. Facial recognition, voice, HRI, and consumer-friendly hardware. The hard skills underneath are extremely highly optimized but fundamentally weak and outdated by over 20 years. ASIMO runs on the same hardware and algorithms from the 90s except for batteries, computer speed and sensor accuracy. In the US we have been extremely inventive with hardware design- eg all-plastic mass-manufacture BAXTER, or ATLAS, which is largely hydraulic. The newest generations of ATLAS have hydraulic actuators integrated into the frame. ASIMO and most japanese robots use a variation on ZMP walking methods, which has the characteristic high-knee, ankle-heavy look. It's extremely inefficient and unstable. Russian robots use this too. Other robots in the US, Europe and even in China use much more efficient, flexible methods separated by a couple generations of new algorithms. Take Cassie[2] from OSU's dynamic robotics lab. Pretty clearly far ahead of anything in Japan in stability, speed, power[3] and efficiency, built by grad students from scratch. Compact series elastic actuators with HZD algorithms. Japanese robots are meant to look perfect. Russian robots are meant to look terrifying. American robots are meant to explore new algorithms or technologies. European robots are mostly meant to build cars. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJeIUTValE [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is4JZqhAy-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Is4JZqhAy-M [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWVci9qS7Ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWVci9qS7Ds
- dumbfounder 9y agoMicrosoft is working on this too: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/farmbeats-iot-agriculture/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/farmbeats-i... Saw it demonstrated at a tech event last night in DC.
- antoniuschan99 9y agoI'm interested in using Technology in Agriculture. Anyone have any interesting links? This is what I'm working on: http://www.kokonaut.com http://www.kokonaut.com
- Animats 9y agoAbundant Robotics. SRI spinoff. They have an apple-picking robot. It's too slow, too fragile, and uses too much duct tape.[1] They need someone to re-engineer the mechanical parts. Agrobot. Strawberry harvester. Nice vision system, too slow and too fragile.[2] DeepField Robotics. Bosch automatic weeding robot.[3] Well-built, but too expensive. Mechanical engineering for dirty environments is hard. But there's a lot of good machinery working in dirty environments and getting the job done. Computer vision, at last, works, which makes intelligent agricultural implements possible. But the computer vision component isn't a big part of the system; it's basically a smartphone-sized piece of electronics. Most of the problems come from the moving parts. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKT351pQHfI [3] https://www.deepfield-robotics.com/index-en.html https://www.deepfield-robotics.com/index-en.html
- chicob 9y agoThat looks cool. What part of that project are you responsible for?
- antoniuschan99 9y agoIt's currently the Industrial Designer and I.