14 ms·

Can a robot pick a strawberry better, faster, and cheaper than a human?

147 points by jamessun 8y ago

spaceflunky 8y ago
Slightly off topic, but stories like this remind me of the Aeolipile[0] from Ancient Rome. It was a simple steam engine invented in 250BC, but the Romans never applied it to anything because there was no economic impetus. No one in antiquity seriously questioned slavery, and there was no major industry or constructions that couldn't be accomplished by throwing bodies at the problem until it was finished. In modern times, we done the same thing with a lot of industries, like agriculture. Fruit harvesting robots are totally feasible, but we have political and economic policies that make it easier to use migrant labor than it is to invest in innovation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
- tynpeddler 8y ago
  Aeoliphile is an open cycle engine and so inefficient that it's practically useless for doing work. It took the Europeans a lot of time to develop the skills necessary to build closed cycle steam engines efficient and powerful enough to do work.
  - frabert 8y ago
    Doesn't change the fact that if the Romans thought that an engine would have been useful, they would probably have begun studying a way of making it more efficient.
  - kilpikaarna 8y ago
    I'd also argue that ancient physics based around static objects would've been an insufficient basis for developing a theory of thermodynamics, which is what was required to turn the steam engine into more than a curiosity for pumping water out of mines. Without Newton and Galileo developing a physics of motion there wouldn't have been a Carnot.
    - chopin 8y ago
      Carnot's work came almost 50 years after Watt's development of his steam engine. Of course valuable, but not strictly necessary. One could argue that thermodynamics developed out of necessity for more efficient engines but it's not a strict prerequisite. As another example the brothers Montgolfier weren't aware that heated air could lift their balloon because it had less density than cold air. They still managed to get it work.
  - chopin 8y ago
    I think that steam engines went hand in hand with the availability of coal. Even the production of steel (or iron) was hampered by the fact that there wasn't enough stuff to burn. Afaik there was much less forestry in Europe until the advent of coal as the wood was burnt for heating, cooking and iron work.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      Yes, this is a serious underappreciated problem. Before we had fossil fuels we were entirely dependent on inefficient biomass for comfort, survival and transport. And the production of coal from all but the shallowest mines requires pumps. One of the first uses of steam engines was ... pumping out coal mines.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      I remember whale oil being an important source of fuel for some uses as well
      - abakker 8y ago
        For lighting, definitely. I'm not aware of it having ever been used for heating at any scale?
    - Nomentatus 8y ago
      Certainly the 1712 Newcomen engine exploded the amount of available coal, because water could now be pumped from mines.
    - tynpeddler 8y ago
      I've also heard (but not confirmed) that the skills used for forging cannons and guns were necessary for developing the pistons used in lots of early steam engines
  - Nomentatus 8y ago
    It's a wildly inefficient turbine; but better designs of turbines are very practical. Including a design Tesla originated that's remarkably similar, functionally, to the Aeoliphile. These too are not necessarily closed cycle. Getting the steam back saves a little energy 'cause the water you're boiling is hotter to start with, but that's a small saving compared to the energy cost to change the phase of water. The biggest problem with the Aeoliphile was just that it was a poor implementation, a lousy first prototype. Or to put that same case conversely, the real drawback was that there was no sufficiently cheap source of energy (even peat) back then. So there was no obvious reason to mount the learning curve.
- goto11 8y ago
  While you don't have to pay slaves, they were not free. They were expensive to buy and you had to provide food etc. (And they might rebel and kill you.) The Romans did use things like water mills, so they might as well have used steam engines if they had actually been practical. I'm not sure the Romans ever realized the device could be used to perform work. It is really just a curiosity.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Not to be confused with the Aiolipile, a very tasty garlic lake near Rome. Quite surprising that a steam engine existed that early. I hope it doesn't take another 2000 years for robots to be used for these tasks.
  - magduf 8y ago
    >Quite surprising that a steam engine existed that early. I hope it doesn't take another 2000 years for robots to be used for these tasks. Most likely, it will take at least that long. Remember, the reason it took 2000 years to get from Rome's simple steam engine to what we have now is because Rome collapsed and its technologies and civilization were lost for over 1000 years while Europe suffered through the Dark Ages and Medieval times. The same is going to happen to us.
    - tabtab 8y ago
      The early practical steam engines of the 1600's were barely practical. It took experimenting and experience to make them practical for general manufacturing, not just niches. The same with semiconductors: it took decades of trial and error to make them more practical than vacuum tubes even though their "interesting properties" were known about in the 1800's. (Manufacturing them in consistent form proved daunting.) If you knew in advanced they had the most promise, sure you could pump R&D into them. But without such foresight, one cannot tell how much promise they actually have. Compare to cold-fusion, flying cars, and hot-fusion reactors: always "just around the corner" but never arrive in a practical sense. Promising-looking ideas don't always actually deliver in the short/medium-term, and vice versa. Unless they have value in intermediate form, they may not be a wise investment from the perspective of politicians/kings, who prefer results before they retire. Otherwise, they spend resources that don't get them re-elected or that don't give them an edge against enemies. Eli Whitney's "interchangeable parts" claim was mostly hype when it first appeared. But the semi-interchangeable nature of his products was good enough to make them more useful than the prior approaches. Half-reshaping for fit is better than full re-shaping. It kept his process running long enough to reach full interchangeability through gradual trial and error.
- hugh4life 8y ago
  "Fruit harvesting robots are totally feasible, but we have political and economic policies that make it easier to use migrant labor than it is to invest in innovation." While it's true the political and economic sentiment has been against farm automation, we haven't had the technology to make most farm automation tasks feasible until recently and it still has a long ways to go.
  - alexgmcm 8y ago
    Yeah - but the argument is that we don't have the tech because there is no point investing in the research when you can get a load of cheap labour to do it the work instead.
- tabtab 8y ago
  Businesses often claim there's a "labor shortage" and lobby for overseas workers without changing their practices, such as paying more or allowing longer training curves for hirees that are a close enough match but not an exact match. They did this in agriculture and IT, and the lobbying usually worked. If denied the easy out, companies will change their employment practices and/or automate.
- cobbzilla 8y ago
  That's quite amazing. It reminds me of a book I read last year, "Kingdom of the Wicked". It presumes an industrial revolution in ancient Rome, around about the time you mention the Aeolipile was invented. The book is set in the first century CE; the Romans have cars, television, and other trappings of industrial life. It's really well written, if you're a history buff you'll chew right through it.
bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago
Betteridge's Law of Headlines expanded - if the answer isn't "No," it's "Not yet."
- porpoisely 8y ago
  I suggest calling it the bitxbitxbitcoin addendum.
gumby 8y ago
I hope robots lead to smaller, tasty strawberries (i.e. the normal ones). The strawberries I find in the US are all enormous and have no taste. I have always assumed it's because these are easier to harvest.
- beagle3 8y ago
  Anecdotal: A strawberry farmer once told me that people prefer to buy the bigger ones, unaware they are less tasty, so that's what he's growing.
  - gumby 8y ago
    I guess it's like the chickens: large and without flavor. Perhaps most people in the US have never experienced ordinary food?
    - mamon 8y ago
      After I moved to California (quite recently) I was shocked by the quality of food here, compared to Europe. In fact I think most of so called "American cuisine" are actually workarounds for that poor quality. They use enormous amounts of ketchup, because it very efficiently kills the taste of everything underneath. They use toasters, because American bread tastes like it was made of sawdust mixed with gum, and toasting it makes it taste slightly better. They grill a lot of things for the same reason. They eat a lot of eggs, because it is almost impossible to cook them wrong :) And they don't eat much of the vegetables, because they are expensive and hard to come by. I've actually been to a Walmart which, despite being huge (200k sqft) have not sold any fresh vegetables at all.
      - adriveatrain 8y ago
        > enormous amounts of ketchup, because it very efficiently .... if it was efficient, why use enormous amounts? The conditions you describe are called "food deserts" and is an oft discussed topic. https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/ https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/
samdung 8y ago
The reason industry wants robots instead of people is because the robots cannot organise themselves into a union (well, until some AI kicks in in a future upgrade).
- thecolorblue 8y ago
  I usually think of it as trading a capital (up front) cost for a operational (ongoing) cost. They want to purchase machinery up front instead of paying employees/contractors monthly. Usually, this is more efficient as long as they can get their financing up front as well. If they could pay the people up front for 5 years of work, at a fixed rate, they would probably do that.
  - est31 8y ago
    What if in some year doing harvests makes no sense because of storms or low prices or too little rain or too little sun or whatever. Such years exist. They are very bad financially for them but it would be even worse if they still had to pay for the employees while having no income from sales.
    - CloudNetworking 8y ago
      I bet those still in business have accounted for such years. You won't pay for your robots thinking you'll get to sell 100% of your crops every year.
    - magduf 8y ago
      >What if in some year doing harvests makes no sense because of storms or low prices or too little rain or too little sun or whatever. Such years exist. For strawberries, they shouldn't. You should be growing them inside some kind of shelter with irrigation.
xiphias2 8y ago
It made sense for a long time that picking robots are coming, whats more interesting for me is the timing: it seems like they will mature at the same time as self driving cars
sundvor 8y ago
Ah, as a kid/teenager I picked strawberries a whole summer holiday to earn the cash for a C64. Back breaking stuff but the reward made it all so worth it!
- giarc 8y ago
  Did the farm you worked at have riders? https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/600x441-Lying_Down.jpg https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/...
  - sundvor 8y ago
    Ah, haha. No such luxuries there.
- devmunchies 8y ago
  There's something to be said for a physical, temporal cost to receive a reward. Cooking my own food or chopping my own wood for warmth really makes me value the result that much more. Although I don't know that this sentiment applies to this article since it about industrial farming, and not personal gardens.
agumonkey 8y ago
I wonder if there's a middle ground between fully automated robotics farming and smart lo-tech tooling for humans.
le-mark 8y ago
When I was growing up our family had a fairly sizeable strawberry patch. My Dad enjoyed gardening, and for a few years my parents canned the produce we produced. Strawberry preserves were a treat I didn't realize until I was an adult. The strawberry patched served dual purpose. Kids too rowdy? Go weed the strawberries. Strawberry picking can be a little tricky. Strawberries like to grow all over the plant, both in plain sight on the periphery, and nestled in among the leaves by the stems. Strawberry plants grow "runners" and spread out of their own accord making walking among them a challenge of not stepping on nascent runners. Strawberries aren't always right for eating though. Sometimes a turtle would take a bite, sometimes it would be to moist and rot on the stem. Sometimes they'd become a projectile to stain a siblings face or clothes. Today my father is 81 and still tending his strawberries. He gets excercise and keeps busy, and we bring them home to eat during the growing months. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot depending on the year.
- asaph 8y ago
  > Strawberry preserves were a treat I didn't realize until I was an adult. Huh? This doesn't seem to fit with the rest of your story. Despite plentiful strawberries and a canning operation in your house, you didn't have any strawberry preserves until adulthood? Did I misunderstand? Please explain.
  - folli 8y ago
    Maybe OP regarded them as too common when he was a kid, and only realized as an adult how much of a treat they were.
  - michaelmcdonald 8y ago
    I believe he's saying that he had fresh strawberry preserves readily available as a child; however as an adult that was not the case. He didn't come to realize how fortunate he was to have the strawberry preserves until adulthood.
  - chongli 8y ago
    There's a saying "you don't realize what you have until it's gone." People tend to take for granted the most precious things (and people) in their lives. When they lose them, they truly feel the pain of what they're now missing.
crazygringo 8y ago
Given that phones comes with FaceID for cheap 3D scanning, and the level of object recognition that comes with deep neural networks these days, I'm curious what major obstacles remain? Surely pads on robot fingers can ensure soft and distributed enough pressure? Is it something to do with holding the stem with one robot grip while pulling the strawberry? Is it pulling apart parts of the plant systematically to find the strawberries in the first place? Or the fact that the plant isn't rigid like a tree, but that the location of the strawberries depends on how it's being held or pulled apart in the first place? Also curious what the break-even point is, where even if it collects less strawberries than people do, it still winds up being cheaper. Kind of bummed the article doesn't go any details at all except for avoiding the half-eaten ones. I picked strawberries as a kid (we'd go to the local orchard) and it was so much fun, but I can't really remember the mechanics of it.
- joshvm 8y ago
  Detecting strawberries is easy, but there are several factors once you've done that. You need to determine the location, the orientation to determine the best cutting angle (and then finding a motion solution for the robot). You need to determine if the fruit is occluded and if you can actually reach it. A human will instinctively move foliage out of the way. A robot has to have some way of doing that without destroying the plant. Different companies have different approaches. I really like the agrobot method which cups the strawberry and then pulls it upwards, severing the stem. Grasping is not viable right now, in my opinion, it's too easy to damage the crop. There's lots of research going on (force-torque sensors, adaptive/smart grasping), but it's still in universities.
  - JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    Robots can have smaller hands, even tentacles, and not have the same problems with 'things in the way'. Robots aren't going to pick strawberries like a person would, and its going to be the innovations that make this an interesting solution.
    - eli_gottlieb 8y ago
joshvm 8y ago
Another year, another strawberry harvesting robot. I've worked on agri projects that looked into the feasibility of this, though we never attempted to pick anything. The reason strawberries are always the fruit of choice is because they're a high value crop. They're also a relatively easy fruit to identify based on colour, and the way they're grown makes them relatively easy to segment against the surrounding foliage. The main issue is cost. Several projects died in the UK (see http://ict-agri.eu/node/36238 http://ict-agri.eu/node/36238) because the end-users i.e. big growers didn't see there being value for money. So no, cheaper is not happening. And this is in a country with Brexit looming and a heavy dependence on season labour; though I don't know if we have a shortage, only that British people don't want to do it. https://www.southeastfarmer.net/section/fruit/robots-arent-ready-to-replace-human-pickers https://www.southeastfarmer.net/section/fruit/robots-arent-r... From the article: > The robot rarely hurts the produce. But as of today, one robotic apple-picker costs at least $300,000 — too much for most budgets. In the UK the money is in high value glasshouse crops like berries and tomatoes. One issue is you would have to design the entire glasshouse to optimise for robotics. Ever tried to drive a robot in a glasshouse? The floor is often bare dirt or covered with polyethene sheeting which gets caught in whatever wheels you choose. Outdoors is another matter. A lot of harvesting robots just rip up everything which is.. one way to do it. Bear in mind that indoor agri is usually fairly automated already, certainly with regard to climate control. Europe, particularly the Netherlands, has this down - absolutely enormous installations. There are lots of strawberry startups. Agrobot (http://agrobot.com/ http://agrobot.com/), a Spanish company, looks the most promising and I think you can actually buy it. Their technique is also very simple and avoids complications with robotic arms. There's also Dogtooth, Octinion, and more.. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43816207 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43816207 (Harvest CROO is also mentioned)
- dmos62 8y ago
  The strawberries in the agrobot intro video [0] are so orange I'd never eat them, much less buy them. Just from watching the video, I get a sour, dry taste in my mouth. Who'd possibly produce a video like this, when their business is strawberries? But then again, maybe that's the operating requirements of the system, because they're dropped, not placed in the transport bins. You couldn't drop ripe ones without damaging them. [0] https://youtu.be/SmOkhVu6oUI?t=5 https://youtu.be/SmOkhVu6oUI?t=5
zeroname 8y ago
> The future of agricultural work has arrived here in Florida, promising to ease labor shortages and reduce the cost of food There is no labor shortage. There's a bunch of growers whining about having to raise wages to attract workers. Even 25$/hour isn't that great if you factor in the opportunity cost of seasonal work. Raising prices and going out of business are valid options for entrepreneurs. That's how the market allocates resources. Unprofitable work is inefficient. > He pays his workers between $10 and $14 hourly. They’re mostly local folks. > “A lot of Americans have become lazy,” Carrigan said. “They want a paycheck. They don’t want a job.” More like a lot of Americans have better things to do than doing seasonal work for 10$ to 14$ an hour. Good for them!
- ataturk 8y ago
  They want work that doesn't leave them working poor--they're not stupid, in other words! $10-$14/hr is almost EVERY JOB out there now except high-tech, lawyering, doctoring, and a few other things. When I looked around at what else I might do besides write code for a living, I was stunned at how little most people make. With inflation, Americans have actually fallen backwards in pay. Most blue collar people have 2-3 jobs and have to really hustle to make ends meet and they're still behind on the bills or lack insurance or make their car payment every other month. It's disgusting, and it's all due to how corporations have manipulated us and manipulated government while importing slave labor (e.g. non-citizens who fear any legal situation) on the low end. None of this was an accident, none of it.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Seasonal work at $10-$14/hour is not sufficient to support a person still living in the US during the off-season. The employer is relying on that worker's ability to find work in other seasons, or to decamp to a less costly locale. Even full-time, year-round work at $14/hour is a poverty-level wage by census thresholds for a household size of 5 or more. A lot of Americans have become pinched by increasing living costs and stagnant wages. They haven't become lazy; they just haven't become more stupid. Working a job has actual costs and opportunity costs. Does the nearest bus route have stops near your farm? Do workers have to cover their own insurance costs? Are they eligible for benefits that would be cut if they have earned income? Could they earn more in another job with better working conditions? The expectation Americans have is, like people in other countries, that if they work all day on a job that can't be easily done by a robot, they should earn enough to be able to support themselves without further supplementation via welfare programs or charity. When housing costs and healthcare costs go up, that means the opportunity cost of living near enough to a farm to work on it, and assuming the risks of working on a farm, makes the wage minus the implicit costs of working there less than the profit of working for a lower absolute wage at a business in town. These people calling workers lazy have no idea how much it costs people just to come to work for them. If they did, they would be clamoring for socialized medicine and public housing, instead of fighting it.
ataturk 8y ago
We already have robots to pick food, they're called "illegal immigrants" and it's a huge scandal how Democrats and Republicans are placing the needs of the neo-serfs ahead of the actual citizens because that's what their corporate masters demand of them. It's the 21st Century, but it looks more like the 15th from these eyes. When are people going to wake up to the fact that importing non-citizens, and keeping them in a state of legal limbo is no good for them or the rest of us? This is just like how they put H1Bs over a barrel. Corporations wants robots and slaves. We need to break their stranglehold on government because if we don't, our children are going to live through the darkest period of human history not yet written.
NedIsakoff 8y ago
Why does it need to be an AND? If it is much cheaper and faster but 5% worse, why not?
- toast0 8y ago
  If it's worse at harvesting, that likely means less product, but also a lower grade of product; which means a much lower income for the farm, unless the difference in time to market makes up for it (early season strawberries are significantly higher priced than mid season).
carolina_33 8y ago
Better and faster? Maybe. Cheaper? Definitely. Approximately $20k per low-skilled immigrant household per year in taxpayer funded benefits. 57% of immigrant households (legal and illegal) use welfare. And 25% of our federal prison population are in the country illegally. So the real price of strawberries would likely go down, considering the high cost the nation bares for the immediate gratification of cheap fruit.
- escape_goat 8y ago
  Well, obviously it would not happen unless there was a strong financial incentive. It would be a pretty big capital investment. That aside, there are a few caveats that need to go with your citations. Firstly, farm labour is simply not a "low-skilled" profession. You cannot up yourself from your chair, go to pick fruit, and expect to be anywhere near as productive as your "low-skilled" immigrant co-workers. Not until you have several years of experience. If you have any doubt, definitive proof of this can be found in the relative pricing of slaves (prior to emancipation) based on their years of field experience. Secondly, although 57% of immigrant households do receive social benefits, in most cases it is an American citizen who is the person in the household eligible to receive the benefits. Thirdly, illegal immigrants are disproportionately represented in federal prison populations because (i) illegal immigration is a federal crime, and (ii) international drug trafficking is a federal crime. Illegal immigrants are disproportionately likely to be in prison for one of those offences. However, there is no statistical correlation between immigrant populations (legal or otherwise) and higher crime rates.
- moosey 8y ago
  > 57% of immigrant households (legal and illegal) use welfare. Fact: 57% of _homes with children_ where the head of household is an immigrant use welfare, where these are the welfare programs in consideration: "The welfare programs examined in this report are SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low income elderly and disabled), TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food program), free/reduced school lunch, food stamps, Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies." It could be millions of children, many US citizens, receiving reduced lunches. I didn't read much further because I didn't need to in order to be totally fine with feeding children, many of whom are US citizens. (Edit: to be clear, I'm ecstatic to be taxed to feed non-US citizen children as well). About the prison situation: > A 2005 report estimated that 27% of federal prison inmates are noncitizens, convicted of crimes while in the country legally or illegally.[34] However, federal prison inmates account for six percent of the total incarcerated population; noncitizen populations in state and local prisons are more difficult to establish. It is 'technically true' that 27% of everyone in federal prison, or about 1.5% of the total prison population in the United States, was an immigrant in the country legally or illegally. The statistic doesn't go into more detail where I read. Regarding the first entry, "$20k in costs per immigrant household per year", is complicated, and any person interested might want to spend time reading the wikipedia entry on the economic effects on immigrants [3]. [1] - https://www.disabled-world.com/news/america/immigrants.php https://www.disabled-world.com/news/america/immigrants.php [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States#Economic_impact_of_undocumented_immigrants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_imm...
LinuxBender 8y ago
Faster per strawberry or faster per day? If per day, a robot can move slower and run 24/7. I could see advantages to this for pest control for some types of produce as well, as some pests are nocturnal. This may be a little taboo to speak of, but I should add that the field workers in my neck of the woods were paid by volume and discouraged from using the portable restrooms. The people running the strawberry fields saved money by not having the septic truck come out as often, too. I am not sure how common this is.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  My parents grew up picking tobacco over the summer and it was apparently the thing to urinate on the leaves to mess with the girls preparing them for drying. Something to think about.
xchip 8y ago
I know some people down vote TL;DRs but I do want to save people's time. The answer is the robot didn't perform well during the demo.
dfilppi 8y ago
I think I'd focus on manufacturing strawberries rather than growing them in the ground.
theptip 8y ago
One of the interesting (but little-discussed) aspects of the minimum wage debate is how it interacts with automation. Historically, the cost of building a robot to do someone's job was in most cases effectively infinite (i.e. it could not be done no matter how much money you throw at the problem). Now, it seems like it's potentially in the $20-50/hour range for many industries, by which I mean not currently cost-competitive with existing labor, but getting close. It would be a fairly significant unintended consequence if setting the national minimum wage to $15 were to actually eliminate entire job categories like fruit picker and burger flipper, due to pushing the minimum cost of labor above the cost of automating the role. It's very interesting to watch developments like those described in the OP, since they will probably see sigmoid-like adoption; pretty much zero, until someone gets a model that's cost-competitive, and then I'd imagine quite wide adoption within a couple years. I don't think a minimum wage is going to solve the social unrest that this kind of technological change will bring.
- tathougies 8y ago
  > It would be a fairly significant unintended consequence if setting the national minimum wage to $15 were to actually eliminate entire job categories like fruit picker and burger flipper, due to pushing the minimum cost of labor above the cost of automating the role. This is not an unintended consequence, IMO. An unintended consequence is typically something that is not foreseeable, but the conversion of jobs to automation after minimum wage increases is not unforeseeable. You'd learn about that in an entry-level economics course.
  - theptip 8y ago
    > An unintended consequence is typically something that is not foreseeable I'm using the definition of "an unintended consequence is a consequence that was not intended". Whether it was foreseeable is a different matter. Put another way, I believe that the intention of most people advocating a $15/h minimum wage is to increase the welfare of those currently earning sub-$15/h wages, not to eradicate their jobs. Therefore if job eradication is the consequence of the policy under discussion, then it is an unintended consequence for those advocates.
kwhitefoot 8y ago
Interesting that the picture captioned: "Bob Pitzer, co-founder of Harvest Croo Robotics, holds a fresh strawberry picked from the fields" shows an unripe strawberry. That sort of strawberry is why I don't bother with out of season strawberries and just buy them here (Norway) when the local ones are in season. Smaller, sweeter, ripe all the way through, and usually much better flavour than most of the imported stuff.
adriveatrain 8y ago
> But Harv doesn’t need ... sick days. Spoken like someone who has never run a factory
devmunchies 8y ago
I bet it can eat it faster too!
patorjk 8y ago
> At the least, social media trains us to stay within the lane of our “brand”. Even with a very small following, I've noticed this on Instagram. Whenever I post something outside of my niche, my likes take a dive, even if I think it's a pretty nice picture. Though the more I think about it, it's only really training you to stay in your lane if maximum likes and follows are what you're after.
Simulacra 8y ago
I think this push i to robotic farming is a very good thing. Working on farms is very dangerous[1] work, and it forces people to contend with these dangers for not very much pay. Of course that begs the question: Should we push for the removal of humans from the equation, or force farms to be safer? [1]. https://publicintegrity.org/workers-rights/worker-health-and-safety/perils-of-the-new-pesticides/farmworkers-plagued-by-pesticides-red-tape/ https://publicintegrity.org/workers-rights/worker-health-and...
thangalin 8y ago
Henry Kissinger once noted: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” I've been working on a model for a free food distribution system[1]. From the article, Harv is on the way to satisfying step 4. We've seen step 6 addressed with services like FoodDash[2]. The cannabis industry will drive innovation for step 3. Step 8 is being worked on and companies such as Big Wheel Burger[3] are helping. Once nuclear fusion is in place[4], the most difficult part of the model is to accomplish step 5, self-maintenance. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/MX68gg7.png https://i.imgur.com/MX68gg7.png [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166660/gm-cruise-doordash-test-self-driving-food-delivery https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166660/gm-cruise-doordas... [3]: https://bigwheelburger.com/sustainability/ https://bigwheelburger.com/sustainability/ [4]: https://www.cfs.energy/ https://www.cfs.energy/
Jedd 8y ago
> “If we don’t solve this with automation, fresh fruits and veggies won’t be affordable or even available to the average person.” I think this mistakenly assumes that the average person resides in a highly urbanised environment with no access to soil, and/or no time to tend even a small garden, and/or the current systems for harvesting all fruit and vegetables can't work in the future.

147 points by jamessun 8y ago

Slightly off topic, but stories like this remind me of the Aeolipile[0] from Ancient Rome. It was a simple steam engine invented in 250BC, but the Romans never applied it to anything because there was no economic impetus. No one in antiquity seriously questioned slavery, and there was no major industry or constructions that couldn't be accomplished by throwing bodies at the problem until it was finished. In modern times, we done the same thing with a lot of industries, like agriculture. Fruit harvesting robots are totally feasible, but we have political and economic policies that make it easier to use migrant labor than it is to invest in innovation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile

tynpeddler 8y ago
Aeoliphile is an open cycle engine and so inefficient that it's practically useless for doing work. It took the Europeans a lot of time to develop the skills necessary to build closed cycle steam engines efficient and powerful enough to do work.
- frabert 8y ago
  Doesn't change the fact that if the Romans thought that an engine would have been useful, they would probably have begun studying a way of making it more efficient.
- kilpikaarna 8y ago
  I'd also argue that ancient physics based around static objects would've been an insufficient basis for developing a theory of thermodynamics, which is what was required to turn the steam engine into more than a curiosity for pumping water out of mines. Without Newton and Galileo developing a physics of motion there wouldn't have been a Carnot.
  - chopin 8y ago
    Carnot's work came almost 50 years after Watt's development of his steam engine. Of course valuable, but not strictly necessary. One could argue that thermodynamics developed out of necessity for more efficient engines but it's not a strict prerequisite. As another example the brothers Montgolfier weren't aware that heated air could lift their balloon because it had less density than cold air. They still managed to get it work.
- chopin 8y ago
  I think that steam engines went hand in hand with the availability of coal. Even the production of steel (or iron) was hampered by the fact that there wasn't enough stuff to burn. Afaik there was much less forestry in Europe until the advent of coal as the wood was burnt for heating, cooking and iron work.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    Yes, this is a serious underappreciated problem. Before we had fossil fuels we were entirely dependent on inefficient biomass for comfort, survival and transport. And the production of coal from all but the shallowest mines requires pumps. One of the first uses of steam engines was ... pumping out coal mines.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    I remember whale oil being an important source of fuel for some uses as well
    - abakker 8y ago
      For lighting, definitely. I'm not aware of it having ever been used for heating at any scale?
  - Nomentatus 8y ago
    Certainly the 1712 Newcomen engine exploded the amount of available coal, because water could now be pumped from mines.
  - tynpeddler 8y ago
    I've also heard (but not confirmed) that the skills used for forging cannons and guns were necessary for developing the pistons used in lots of early steam engines
- Nomentatus 8y ago
  It's a wildly inefficient turbine; but better designs of turbines are very practical. Including a design Tesla originated that's remarkably similar, functionally, to the Aeoliphile. These too are not necessarily closed cycle. Getting the steam back saves a little energy 'cause the water you're boiling is hotter to start with, but that's a small saving compared to the energy cost to change the phase of water. The biggest problem with the Aeoliphile was just that it was a poor implementation, a lousy first prototype. Or to put that same case conversely, the real drawback was that there was no sufficiently cheap source of energy (even peat) back then. So there was no obvious reason to mount the learning curve.
goto11 8y ago
While you don't have to pay slaves, they were not free. They were expensive to buy and you had to provide food etc. (And they might rebel and kill you.) The Romans did use things like water mills, so they might as well have used steam engines if they had actually been practical. I'm not sure the Romans ever realized the device could be used to perform work. It is really just a curiosity.
raxxorrax 8y ago
Not to be confused with the Aiolipile, a very tasty garlic lake near Rome. Quite surprising that a steam engine existed that early. I hope it doesn't take another 2000 years for robots to be used for these tasks.
- magduf 8y ago
  >Quite surprising that a steam engine existed that early. I hope it doesn't take another 2000 years for robots to be used for these tasks. Most likely, it will take at least that long. Remember, the reason it took 2000 years to get from Rome's simple steam engine to what we have now is because Rome collapsed and its technologies and civilization were lost for over 1000 years while Europe suffered through the Dark Ages and Medieval times. The same is going to happen to us.
  - tabtab 8y ago
    The early practical steam engines of the 1600's were barely practical. It took experimenting and experience to make them practical for general manufacturing, not just niches. The same with semiconductors: it took decades of trial and error to make them more practical than vacuum tubes even though their "interesting properties" were known about in the 1800's. (Manufacturing them in consistent form proved daunting.) If you knew in advanced they had the most promise, sure you could pump R&D into them. But without such foresight, one cannot tell how much promise they actually have. Compare to cold-fusion, flying cars, and hot-fusion reactors: always "just around the corner" but never arrive in a practical sense. Promising-looking ideas don't always actually deliver in the short/medium-term, and vice versa. Unless they have value in intermediate form, they may not be a wise investment from the perspective of politicians/kings, who prefer results before they retire. Otherwise, they spend resources that don't get them re-elected or that don't give them an edge against enemies. Eli Whitney's "interchangeable parts" claim was mostly hype when it first appeared. But the semi-interchangeable nature of his products was good enough to make them more useful than the prior approaches. Half-reshaping for fit is better than full re-shaping. It kept his process running long enough to reach full interchangeability through gradual trial and error.
hugh4life 8y ago
"Fruit harvesting robots are totally feasible, but we have political and economic policies that make it easier to use migrant labor than it is to invest in innovation." While it's true the political and economic sentiment has been against farm automation, we haven't had the technology to make most farm automation tasks feasible until recently and it still has a long ways to go.
- alexgmcm 8y ago
  Yeah - but the argument is that we don't have the tech because there is no point investing in the research when you can get a load of cheap labour to do it the work instead.
tabtab 8y ago
Businesses often claim there's a "labor shortage" and lobby for overseas workers without changing their practices, such as paying more or allowing longer training curves for hirees that are a close enough match but not an exact match. They did this in agriculture and IT, and the lobbying usually worked. If denied the easy out, companies will change their employment practices and/or automate.
cobbzilla 8y ago
That's quite amazing. It reminds me of a book I read last year, "Kingdom of the Wicked". It presumes an industrial revolution in ancient Rome, around about the time you mention the Aeolipile was invented. The book is set in the first century CE; the Romans have cars, television, and other trappings of industrial life. It's really well written, if you're a history buff you'll chew right through it.

bitxbitxbitcoin 8y ago

Betteridge's Law of Headlines expanded - if the answer isn't "No," it's "Not yet."

porpoisely 8y ago
I suggest calling it the bitxbitxbitcoin addendum.

gumby 8y ago

I hope robots lead to smaller, tasty strawberries (i.e. the normal ones). The strawberries I find in the US are all enormous and have no taste. I have always assumed it's because these are easier to harvest.

beagle3 8y ago
Anecdotal: A strawberry farmer once told me that people prefer to buy the bigger ones, unaware they are less tasty, so that's what he's growing.
- gumby 8y ago
  I guess it's like the chickens: large and without flavor. Perhaps most people in the US have never experienced ordinary food?
  - mamon 8y ago
    After I moved to California (quite recently) I was shocked by the quality of food here, compared to Europe. In fact I think most of so called "American cuisine" are actually workarounds for that poor quality. They use enormous amounts of ketchup, because it very efficiently kills the taste of everything underneath. They use toasters, because American bread tastes like it was made of sawdust mixed with gum, and toasting it makes it taste slightly better. They grill a lot of things for the same reason. They eat a lot of eggs, because it is almost impossible to cook them wrong :) And they don't eat much of the vegetables, because they are expensive and hard to come by. I've actually been to a Walmart which, despite being huge (200k sqft) have not sold any fresh vegetables at all.
    - adriveatrain 8y ago
      > enormous amounts of ketchup, because it very efficiently .... if it was efficient, why use enormous amounts? The conditions you describe are called "food deserts" and is an oft discussed topic. https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/ https://www.cdc.gov/features/FoodDeserts/

samdung 8y ago

The reason industry wants robots instead of people is because the robots cannot organise themselves into a union (well, until some AI kicks in in a future upgrade).

thecolorblue 8y ago
I usually think of it as trading a capital (up front) cost for a operational (ongoing) cost. They want to purchase machinery up front instead of paying employees/contractors monthly. Usually, this is more efficient as long as they can get their financing up front as well. If they could pay the people up front for 5 years of work, at a fixed rate, they would probably do that.
- est31 8y ago
  What if in some year doing harvests makes no sense because of storms or low prices or too little rain or too little sun or whatever. Such years exist. They are very bad financially for them but it would be even worse if they still had to pay for the employees while having no income from sales.
  - CloudNetworking 8y ago
    I bet those still in business have accounted for such years. You won't pay for your robots thinking you'll get to sell 100% of your crops every year.
  - magduf 8y ago
    >What if in some year doing harvests makes no sense because of storms or low prices or too little rain or too little sun or whatever. Such years exist. For strawberries, they shouldn't. You should be growing them inside some kind of shelter with irrigation.

xiphias2 8y ago

It made sense for a long time that picking robots are coming, whats more interesting for me is the timing: it seems like they will mature at the same time as self driving cars

sundvor 8y ago

Ah, as a kid/teenager I picked strawberries a whole summer holiday to earn the cash for a C64. Back breaking stuff but the reward made it all so worth it!

giarc 8y ago
Did the farm you worked at have riders? https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/600x441-Lying_Down.jpg https://vegetablegrowersnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/...
- sundvor 8y ago
  Ah, haha. No such luxuries there.
devmunchies 8y ago
There's something to be said for a physical, temporal cost to receive a reward. Cooking my own food or chopping my own wood for warmth really makes me value the result that much more. Although I don't know that this sentiment applies to this article since it about industrial farming, and not personal gardens.

agumonkey 8y ago

I wonder if there's a middle ground between fully automated robotics farming and smart lo-tech tooling for humans.

le-mark 8y ago

When I was growing up our family had a fairly sizeable strawberry patch. My Dad enjoyed gardening, and for a few years my parents canned the produce we produced. Strawberry preserves were a treat I didn't realize until I was an adult. The strawberry patched served dual purpose. Kids too rowdy? Go weed the strawberries. Strawberry picking can be a little tricky. Strawberries like to grow all over the plant, both in plain sight on the periphery, and nestled in among the leaves by the stems. Strawberry plants grow "runners" and spread out of their own accord making walking among them a challenge of not stepping on nascent runners. Strawberries aren't always right for eating though. Sometimes a turtle would take a bite, sometimes it would be to moist and rot on the stem. Sometimes they'd become a projectile to stain a siblings face or clothes. Today my father is 81 and still tending his strawberries. He gets excercise and keeps busy, and we bring them home to eat during the growing months. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot depending on the year.

asaph 8y ago
> Strawberry preserves were a treat I didn't realize until I was an adult. Huh? This doesn't seem to fit with the rest of your story. Despite plentiful strawberries and a canning operation in your house, you didn't have any strawberry preserves until adulthood? Did I misunderstand? Please explain.
- folli 8y ago
  Maybe OP regarded them as too common when he was a kid, and only realized as an adult how much of a treat they were.
- michaelmcdonald 8y ago
  I believe he's saying that he had fresh strawberry preserves readily available as a child; however as an adult that was not the case. He didn't come to realize how fortunate he was to have the strawberry preserves until adulthood.
- chongli 8y ago
  There's a saying "you don't realize what you have until it's gone." People tend to take for granted the most precious things (and people) in their lives. When they lose them, they truly feel the pain of what they're now missing.

crazygringo 8y ago

Given that phones comes with FaceID for cheap 3D scanning, and the level of object recognition that comes with deep neural networks these days, I'm curious what major obstacles remain? Surely pads on robot fingers can ensure soft and distributed enough pressure? Is it something to do with holding the stem with one robot grip while pulling the strawberry? Is it pulling apart parts of the plant systematically to find the strawberries in the first place? Or the fact that the plant isn't rigid like a tree, but that the location of the strawberries depends on how it's being held or pulled apart in the first place? Also curious what the break-even point is, where even if it collects less strawberries than people do, it still winds up being cheaper. Kind of bummed the article doesn't go any details at all except for avoiding the half-eaten ones. I picked strawberries as a kid (we'd go to the local orchard) and it was so much fun, but I can't really remember the mechanics of it.

joshvm 8y ago
Detecting strawberries is easy, but there are several factors once you've done that. You need to determine the location, the orientation to determine the best cutting angle (and then finding a motion solution for the robot). You need to determine if the fruit is occluded and if you can actually reach it. A human will instinctively move foliage out of the way. A robot has to have some way of doing that without destroying the plant. Different companies have different approaches. I really like the agrobot method which cups the strawberry and then pulls it upwards, severing the stem. Grasping is not viable right now, in my opinion, it's too easy to damage the crop. There's lots of research going on (force-torque sensors, adaptive/smart grasping), but it's still in universities.
- JoeAltmaier 8y ago
  Robots can have smaller hands, even tentacles, and not have the same problems with 'things in the way'. Robots aren't going to pick strawberries like a person would, and its going to be the innovations that make this an interesting solution.
  - eli_gottlieb 8y ago

joshvm 8y ago

Another year, another strawberry harvesting robot. I've worked on agri projects that looked into the feasibility of this, though we never attempted to pick anything. The reason strawberries are always the fruit of choice is because they're a high value crop. They're also a relatively easy fruit to identify based on colour, and the way they're grown makes them relatively easy to segment against the surrounding foliage. The main issue is cost. Several projects died in the UK (see http://ict-agri.eu/node/36238 http://ict-agri.eu/node/36238) because the end-users i.e. big growers didn't see there being value for money. So no, cheaper is not happening. And this is in a country with Brexit looming and a heavy dependence on season labour; though I don't know if we have a shortage, only that British people don't want to do it. https://www.southeastfarmer.net/section/fruit/robots-arent-ready-to-replace-human-pickers https://www.southeastfarmer.net/section/fruit/robots-arent-r... From the article: > The robot rarely hurts the produce. But as of today, one robotic apple-picker costs at least $300,000 — too much for most budgets. In the UK the money is in high value glasshouse crops like berries and tomatoes. One issue is you would have to design the entire glasshouse to optimise for robotics. Ever tried to drive a robot in a glasshouse? The floor is often bare dirt or covered with polyethene sheeting which gets caught in whatever wheels you choose. Outdoors is another matter. A lot of harvesting robots just rip up everything which is.. one way to do it. Bear in mind that indoor agri is usually fairly automated already, certainly with regard to climate control. Europe, particularly the Netherlands, has this down - absolutely enormous installations. There are lots of strawberry startups. Agrobot (http://agrobot.com/ http://agrobot.com/), a Spanish company, looks the most promising and I think you can actually buy it. Their technique is also very simple and avoids complications with robotic arms. There's also Dogtooth, Octinion, and more.. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43816207 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-43816207 (Harvest CROO is also mentioned)

dmos62 8y ago
The strawberries in the agrobot intro video [0] are so orange I'd never eat them, much less buy them. Just from watching the video, I get a sour, dry taste in my mouth. Who'd possibly produce a video like this, when their business is strawberries? But then again, maybe that's the operating requirements of the system, because they're dropped, not placed in the transport bins. You couldn't drop ripe ones without damaging them. [0] https://youtu.be/SmOkhVu6oUI?t=5 https://youtu.be/SmOkhVu6oUI?t=5

zeroname 8y ago

> The future of agricultural work has arrived here in Florida, promising to ease labor shortages and reduce the cost of food There is no labor shortage. There's a bunch of growers whining about having to raise wages to attract workers. Even 25$/hour isn't that great if you factor in the opportunity cost of seasonal work. Raising prices and going out of business are valid options for entrepreneurs. That's how the market allocates resources. Unprofitable work is inefficient. > He pays his workers between $10 and $14 hourly. They’re mostly local folks. > “A lot of Americans have become lazy,” Carrigan said. “They want a paycheck. They don’t want a job.” More like a lot of Americans have better things to do than doing seasonal work for 10$ to 14$ an hour. Good for them!

ataturk 8y ago
They want work that doesn't leave them working poor--they're not stupid, in other words! $10-$14/hr is almost EVERY JOB out there now except high-tech, lawyering, doctoring, and a few other things. When I looked around at what else I might do besides write code for a living, I was stunned at how little most people make. With inflation, Americans have actually fallen backwards in pay. Most blue collar people have 2-3 jobs and have to really hustle to make ends meet and they're still behind on the bills or lack insurance or make their car payment every other month. It's disgusting, and it's all due to how corporations have manipulated us and manipulated government while importing slave labor (e.g. non-citizens who fear any legal situation) on the low end. None of this was an accident, none of it.
logfromblammo 8y ago
Seasonal work at $10-$14/hour is not sufficient to support a person still living in the US during the off-season. The employer is relying on that worker's ability to find work in other seasons, or to decamp to a less costly locale. Even full-time, year-round work at $14/hour is a poverty-level wage by census thresholds for a household size of 5 or more. A lot of Americans have become pinched by increasing living costs and stagnant wages. They haven't become lazy; they just haven't become more stupid. Working a job has actual costs and opportunity costs. Does the nearest bus route have stops near your farm? Do workers have to cover their own insurance costs? Are they eligible for benefits that would be cut if they have earned income? Could they earn more in another job with better working conditions? The expectation Americans have is, like people in other countries, that if they work all day on a job that can't be easily done by a robot, they should earn enough to be able to support themselves without further supplementation via welfare programs or charity. When housing costs and healthcare costs go up, that means the opportunity cost of living near enough to a farm to work on it, and assuming the risks of working on a farm, makes the wage minus the implicit costs of working there less than the profit of working for a lower absolute wage at a business in town. These people calling workers lazy have no idea how much it costs people just to come to work for them. If they did, they would be clamoring for socialized medicine and public housing, instead of fighting it.

ataturk 8y ago

We already have robots to pick food, they're called "illegal immigrants" and it's a huge scandal how Democrats and Republicans are placing the needs of the neo-serfs ahead of the actual citizens because that's what their corporate masters demand of them. It's the 21st Century, but it looks more like the 15th from these eyes. When are people going to wake up to the fact that importing non-citizens, and keeping them in a state of legal limbo is no good for them or the rest of us? This is just like how they put H1Bs over a barrel. Corporations wants robots and slaves. We need to break their stranglehold on government because if we don't, our children are going to live through the darkest period of human history not yet written.

NedIsakoff 8y ago

Why does it need to be an AND? If it is much cheaper and faster but 5% worse, why not?

toast0 8y ago
If it's worse at harvesting, that likely means less product, but also a lower grade of product; which means a much lower income for the farm, unless the difference in time to market makes up for it (early season strawberries are significantly higher priced than mid season).

carolina_33 8y ago

Better and faster? Maybe. Cheaper? Definitely. Approximately $20k per low-skilled immigrant household per year in taxpayer funded benefits. 57% of immigrant households (legal and illegal) use welfare. And 25% of our federal prison population are in the country illegally. So the real price of strawberries would likely go down, considering the high cost the nation bares for the immediate gratification of cheap fruit.

escape_goat 8y ago
Well, obviously it would not happen unless there was a strong financial incentive. It would be a pretty big capital investment. That aside, there are a few caveats that need to go with your citations. Firstly, farm labour is simply not a "low-skilled" profession. You cannot up yourself from your chair, go to pick fruit, and expect to be anywhere near as productive as your "low-skilled" immigrant co-workers. Not until you have several years of experience. If you have any doubt, definitive proof of this can be found in the relative pricing of slaves (prior to emancipation) based on their years of field experience. Secondly, although 57% of immigrant households do receive social benefits, in most cases it is an American citizen who is the person in the household eligible to receive the benefits. Thirdly, illegal immigrants are disproportionately represented in federal prison populations because (i) illegal immigration is a federal crime, and (ii) international drug trafficking is a federal crime. Illegal immigrants are disproportionately likely to be in prison for one of those offences. However, there is no statistical correlation between immigrant populations (legal or otherwise) and higher crime rates.
moosey 8y ago
> 57% of immigrant households (legal and illegal) use welfare. Fact: 57% of _homes with children_ where the head of household is an immigrant use welfare, where these are the welfare programs in consideration: "The welfare programs examined in this report are SSI (Supplemental Security Income for low income elderly and disabled), TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families), WIC (Women, Infants, and Children food program), free/reduced school lunch, food stamps, Medicaid (health insurance for those with low incomes), public housing, and rent subsidies." It could be millions of children, many US citizens, receiving reduced lunches. I didn't read much further because I didn't need to in order to be totally fine with feeding children, many of whom are US citizens. (Edit: to be clear, I'm ecstatic to be taxed to feed non-US citizen children as well). About the prison situation: > A 2005 report estimated that 27% of federal prison inmates are noncitizens, convicted of crimes while in the country legally or illegally.[34] However, federal prison inmates account for six percent of the total incarcerated population; noncitizen populations in state and local prisons are more difficult to establish. It is 'technically true' that 27% of everyone in federal prison, or about 1.5% of the total prison population in the United States, was an immigrant in the country legally or illegally. The statistic doesn't go into more detail where I read. Regarding the first entry, "$20k in costs per immigrant household per year", is complicated, and any person interested might want to spend time reading the wikipedia entry on the economic effects on immigrants [3]. [1] - https://www.disabled-world.com/news/america/immigrants.php https://www.disabled-world.com/news/america/immigrants.php [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_immigrants_in_the_United_States#Economic_impact_of_undocumented_immigrants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_illegal_imm...

LinuxBender 8y ago

Faster per strawberry or faster per day? If per day, a robot can move slower and run 24/7. I could see advantages to this for pest control for some types of produce as well, as some pests are nocturnal. This may be a little taboo to speak of, but I should add that the field workers in my neck of the woods were paid by volume and discouraged from using the portable restrooms. The people running the strawberry fields saved money by not having the septic truck come out as often, too. I am not sure how common this is.

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
My parents grew up picking tobacco over the summer and it was apparently the thing to urinate on the leaves to mess with the girls preparing them for drying. Something to think about.

xchip 8y ago

I know some people down vote TL;DRs but I do want to save people's time. The answer is the robot didn't perform well during the demo.

dfilppi 8y ago

I think I'd focus on manufacturing strawberries rather than growing them in the ground.

theptip 8y ago

One of the interesting (but little-discussed) aspects of the minimum wage debate is how it interacts with automation. Historically, the cost of building a robot to do someone's job was in most cases effectively infinite (i.e. it could not be done no matter how much money you throw at the problem). Now, it seems like it's potentially in the $20-50/hour range for many industries, by which I mean not currently cost-competitive with existing labor, but getting close. It would be a fairly significant unintended consequence if setting the national minimum wage to $15 were to actually eliminate entire job categories like fruit picker and burger flipper, due to pushing the minimum cost of labor above the cost of automating the role. It's very interesting to watch developments like those described in the OP, since they will probably see sigmoid-like adoption; pretty much zero, until someone gets a model that's cost-competitive, and then I'd imagine quite wide adoption within a couple years. I don't think a minimum wage is going to solve the social unrest that this kind of technological change will bring.

tathougies 8y ago
> It would be a fairly significant unintended consequence if setting the national minimum wage to $15 were to actually eliminate entire job categories like fruit picker and burger flipper, due to pushing the minimum cost of labor above the cost of automating the role. This is not an unintended consequence, IMO. An unintended consequence is typically something that is not foreseeable, but the conversion of jobs to automation after minimum wage increases is not unforeseeable. You'd learn about that in an entry-level economics course.
- theptip 8y ago
  > An unintended consequence is typically something that is not foreseeable I'm using the definition of "an unintended consequence is a consequence that was not intended". Whether it was foreseeable is a different matter. Put another way, I believe that the intention of most people advocating a $15/h minimum wage is to increase the welfare of those currently earning sub-$15/h wages, not to eradicate their jobs. Therefore if job eradication is the consequence of the policy under discussion, then it is an unintended consequence for those advocates.

kwhitefoot 8y ago

Interesting that the picture captioned: "Bob Pitzer, co-founder of Harvest Croo Robotics, holds a fresh strawberry picked from the fields" shows an unripe strawberry. That sort of strawberry is why I don't bother with out of season strawberries and just buy them here (Norway) when the local ones are in season. Smaller, sweeter, ripe all the way through, and usually much better flavour than most of the imported stuff.

adriveatrain 8y ago

> But Harv doesn’t need ... sick days. Spoken like someone who has never run a factory

devmunchies 8y ago

I bet it can eat it faster too!

patorjk 8y ago

> At the least, social media trains us to stay within the lane of our “brand”. Even with a very small following, I've noticed this on Instagram. Whenever I post something outside of my niche, my likes take a dive, even if I think it's a pretty nice picture. Though the more I think about it, it's only really training you to stay in your lane if maximum likes and follows are what you're after.

Simulacra 8y ago

I think this push i to robotic farming is a very good thing. Working on farms is very dangerous[1] work, and it forces people to contend with these dangers for not very much pay. Of course that begs the question: Should we push for the removal of humans from the equation, or force farms to be safer? [1]. https://publicintegrity.org/workers-rights/worker-health-and-safety/perils-of-the-new-pesticides/farmworkers-plagued-by-pesticides-red-tape/ https://publicintegrity.org/workers-rights/worker-health-and...

thangalin 8y ago

Henry Kissinger once noted: “Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.” I've been working on a model for a free food distribution system[1]. From the article, Harv is on the way to satisfying step 4. We've seen step 6 addressed with services like FoodDash[2]. The cannabis industry will drive innovation for step 3. Step 8 is being worked on and companies such as Big Wheel Burger[3] are helping. Once nuclear fusion is in place[4], the most difficult part of the model is to accomplish step 5, self-maintenance. [1]: https://i.imgur.com/MX68gg7.png https://i.imgur.com/MX68gg7.png [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166660/gm-cruise-doordash-test-self-driving-food-delivery https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18166660/gm-cruise-doordas... [3]: https://bigwheelburger.com/sustainability/ https://bigwheelburger.com/sustainability/ [4]: https://www.cfs.energy/ https://www.cfs.energy/

Jedd 8y ago

> “If we don’t solve this with automation, fresh fruits and veggies won’t be affordable or even available to the average person.” I think this mistakenly assumes that the average person resides in a highly urbanised environment with no access to soil, and/or no time to tend even a small garden, and/or the current systems for harvesting all fruit and vegetables can't work in the future.