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As mentioned, the "25k/day" is for a future model in 2020. According to a linked video in the article, a human does about 10k/day. I believe that right now we'
by SmooL 7y ago
As mentioned, the "25k/day" is for a future model in 2020. According to a linked video in the article, a human does about 10k/day.
I believe that right now we're at the very start of this. Robots were supposed to come for all our manual labor jobs years ago, but they never did, because if it's not a pure assembly line environment, robots can't cope with the uncertainty. Research in robotics is increasing and getting places fast, largely due to advances in reinforcement learning.
I give it another 2 or 3 years until we have a robot hand with a camera that acts as dexterous and capable as a human hand. Once we have that, tons of opportunities like this raspberry picking are open for automation.
- PostOnce 7y ago"I give it another 2 or 3 years until we have a robot hand with a camera that acts as dexterous and capable as a human hand." -some guy, circa 1975
- varjag 7y agoThe original 1958 AI proposal was expecting to crack it over a summer hackathon.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jarfil 7y agoAlso, that's 25k/24h for the robot vs 10k/8h for a human. Taking into account that the time of day it's picked has a dramatic effect on a raspberry's taste, these robots may only be useful with artificially illuminated crops... or to pick those "raspberry shaped" flavorless things. Same goes for grapes and several other fruits.
- tty2300 7y agoI don't think that its that robots can't do these jobs but more that underpaid illegal migrants can pick strawberrys for cheaper than a robot setup and maintaince can.
- unwind 7y ago25,000 a day is one berry picked every 3.46 seconds, including overhead to switch plants. That sounds amazing and impossible, for something that needs to move a gripper around the stems and leaves of an actual ("unguided", natural) plant. But I'm no process automation engineer or roboticist, so I'm just looking forward to the amazement. :)
- DaiPlusPlus 7y agoThink: multiple grippers. With two grippers on opposite sides on a robot then it could harvest both sides of a row of plants at once. Or four grippers: two on each side for different heights.
- Someone 7y agoFTA: The final robot version, expected to go into production next year, will have four grippers, all picking simultaneously.
- ksec 7y ago>Robots were supposed to come for all our manual labor jobs years ago It depends, on one hand we have people trying to make Robot act like human, and could easily adopt to many of our job, I think we are still at least another 10 - 15 years away from that. But Robotic Automation for a few specific job is much much closer ( if not already here ) , I don't think it really ever was a "technical" challenges, it is the cost of these development has come down, from manufacturing them in China to Software development tools that make them work. The cost of the final product vs the possible economical advantage has finally reached a point where many of these make sense. More often, if not in all cases, it is always the economical side of things that makes the call, not the technical side of it.
- lopmotr 7y agoThe picking rate is meaningless because you can always increase it by buying more robots. In this case, they plan to have 4 slow grippers to achieve that 25k/day. The performance needs to be given as a ratio with some other important variable like cost so it can meaningfully be compared to humans or other robots.