8 ms·

Robotic harvester plucks an Apple every 7 seconds

32 points by aerophilic 5y ago

zackees 5y ago
There has been an incredible amount of innovation in the food to consumer supply chain. But despite this cost savings, the prices for food keeps on going up. Who’s absorbing all that extra value?
- nerdponx 5y ago
  I always heard that food price fluctuations were dicated mostly by weather events and fuel prices.
- virtue3 5y ago
  I've asked the same question when we saw all the people at the bank disappear to be replaced by computers (you can look at like scenes from older movies with TONS of people at the bank doing processing I assume). Robots, unfortunately, move capital from labor to owners. I'm not proposing robots are bad. You're kinda screwed once they're out in the wild, if you don't adopt them you can't stay in business eventually (without some sort of pivot to a niche market segment).
  - thdxr 5y ago
    In a competitive environment automation doesn't actually help business make money. The increased margin quickly gets turned into discounts that competitors will trade to grab more marketshare. Areas where there is automation but prices continue to go up have issues with competition - banks are a great example because banking licenses are impossible to acquire.
    - virtue3 5y ago
      Really great insight. I would even add in for automation for cars or heavy manufacturing: they increase the cost of getting into the game: thus driving down competition as well.
  - TulliusCicero 5y ago
    People don't explicitly pay for bank accounts anymore -- remember when "free checking" was a big deal? So it actually did have some benefits for consumers.
    - virtue3 5y ago
      I feel like that was... in the 90s? BoA is still only free if you have direct deposit or some such I'm pretty sure. The automation started in the late 70s at least tho. The other child comment about banks and lack of competition I think really hits this on the head.
  - hosh 5y ago
    That's an interesting line of thought. That sparked a different one: Carol Sanford had been talking about "value-adding" for a long time. Not in the sense of "value-added" (such as packaging, or productizing), but in the sense that additional value is created. How can automation add value instead of capturing existing value through better efficiency?
    - virtue3 5y ago
      Interesting, can you elaborate on your question? all of my initial thoughts tend to focus more on better quality assurance etc; which I think is more about efficiency than anything else.
      - hosh 5y ago
        What can you do with the technology that you could not before, that benefits our civilization? I once heard this example using coffee beans. If you buy coffee beans, and you have to brew it, that's a commodity. When you go to a coffee shop, and the server brews it for you and brings it to you, that's a service. When you have one of those single-server instant coffee that you pop into the machine, and it brews it for you, that's a product. The distance between you and the original commodity can be defined as the number of transformations from the coffee plant to your cup. Raw beans that you have to process yourself is closer to the original plant. A service provider inserts themselves into that process of brewing a coffee, and charge you for it. Productizing it so you don't even have to wait on someone else to do it for you inserts additional steps -- packaging, technology, etc. We call this "value-added", meaning that some merchant captures the value from transformational steps that you would have otherwise have to do yourself. However, I am talking about "value-adding". The key difference here is that the transformation changes the commodity in a way that contributes something beyond what you could have done yourself, not simply capturing existing value in the value chain. I think most use of technology and automation are attempting to capture existing value rather than creating value that was not there before. Network effect of the internet might be value-adding, but we have also seen the same network-effect used to aggregate and capture large swaths of the market without contributing anything back (Facebook, for example). Is the network effect of Amazon's logistics prowess value-adding? And if it is, what unintended consequences have we seen from it? It may also be that, for computing, we would have to look at older generations of our software and look for the forks not taken. As an example, Apple's Hypercard enabled individuals to create their own computing experience, something that could not have been done before without it and other systems like it ... and it was deliberately dropped so that all design came from Apple (iPhones, iPads, etc.). By the metric of return on shareholder value, that decision was wildly successful. But in terms of adding value for our civilization, was it? AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero demonstrated that humans can no longer beat AI Go players. If you are willing to spend energy to power all those TPUs, they can play far beyond the best human players. That shook up a lot of the pros. Some of the top players have quit. However, other players got more excited. They saw Go being played in ways they had never seen before. People who made their living tutoring Go to other people have lost their livelihood. On the other hand, Isee discussion at the high amateur ranks now uses Leela Zero, or Katago to learn and explore the game. That's a positive contribution that could not be done before. (And the shadowside: it is easier for people to cheat; though if you are using Go to develop your own intellectual ability to evaluate and make decisions, using an AI to play competitively is kinda cheating yourself).
- jakearmitage 5y ago
  Shipping?
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  My semi-conspiracy theory is that we're in de-facto hyperinflation already (visible in education, healthcare, housing), but it's being masked by wild productivity improvements in agriculture and basic manufacturing which keep inflation at a nominal 2%.
krasin 5y ago
This is a nice proof of concept, but it's not anywhere production-ready. For instance, this apple harvester is using UR5 robot arm. It's a very research-friendly robot that I like to work with, but it's nowhere ready for outdoors. Its reach is just shy of 1 meter -- not practical for apples as well. Their choice to place an Intel RealSense camera on the wrist of the robot means that they have a USB cable running through the robot. My experience shows that even heavy-duty cables only work for hundreds of hours in such a mode and then require a replacement. The soft gripper that they use is a good choice for the task, but it depends on compressed air, which means an extra tube running through the robot arm - usually it means even more maintenance required. Still, this approach can be productionized, but the end result might look very different from this prototype.
- skinner927 5y ago
  What kind of data transmission line can be used for this type of environment?
  - krasin 5y ago
    Many robot arms provide robust RS-485 and (in some cases) Ethernet and have all wires plumbed inside the arm (so, little to no maintenance). In certain non-critical cases (like, agriculture), wireless can be used too, for instance, when there's a strong urge to transfer more video data than the internal link allows for.
- swiley 5y ago
  It's a huge improvement over where we were. I remember being told that picking fruit at all was very hard/impossible for robots even in a lab.
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Would wifi or bluetooth have enough bandwidth to transfer camera data? That would remove the high maintenance cable from the equation at least.
  - 5y ago
tpmx 5y ago
I'm guesstimating that a human worker plucks an apple every 1-2 seconds, sustained?
- 99_00 5y ago
  At least some of the time it seems they just shake the tree and catch the apples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeqf3ZY-V-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeqf3ZY-V-I
  - tpmx 5y ago
    I can't imagine that working well for apples being sold in supermarkets to consumers? For juice/cider/etc though...
    - hinkley 5y ago
      Things are getting better, but a lot of the fruit you eat is selected for shelf and processing stability. Flavor is a secondary concern, and nutrition isn't considered at all. Some people think the latter is part of the obesity epidemic. We have lots of cravings when we are malnourished, and while hyper palatable food can explain a lot of this, it's not the only culprit. Those peaches you eat are the only ones you can get because the others bruise too easily. If you want a 'better' peach you're going to have to plant a tree. It's one of the 'sales pitches' that gardeners and permaculturists use to try to convert people. If you want more nutritious vegatables, you're going to have to get your hands dirty. Vine-ripened foods can be a profoundly different experience than store bought, as anyone who has ever grown a tomato will be all too quick to tell you.
      - smabie 5y ago
        I used to live in Tanzania and while none of the produce or fruit looks very good, it tastes maybe 10x better than anything in America. When I first moved there I was absolutely shocked by how good the fruits/vegetables and even corn tasted.
- CuriouslyC 5y ago
temp667 5y ago
With the billions amazon and apple sell you think they would be automating their warehouses more. Ie, pick steps at least - particularly given the description of Amazon warehouses as "hell holes" relative to other warehouse and physical labor jobs (small owner run construction / warehouse / autobody can also have horrendous discrimination / harassment etc stuff, but perhaps better than the amazon alternative?). I've seen restaurant owners hire folks to hit on them in particular. Maybe an industry thing? Music / film ideally doesn't have that issue but less exposure to that world.
dcanelhas 5y ago
Let me show you a similar system from 2017 that aims to pick bell peppers for a bit of context around what the state of the art in autonomous fruit harvesting looks like: https://research.qut.edu.au/future-farming/projects/harvey-the-robotic-capsicum-sweet-pepper-harvester/ https://research.qut.edu.au/future-farming/projects/harvey-t... "In early 2017, worldwide literature indicated a success rate of only 6% in testing scenarios similar to those used for Harvey, and up to 30% when the crop is modified and leaves are removed." Picking one apple every 7 seconds is not bad, I'd say.
legulere 5y ago
In the video there's 15 seconds between the to Apples being thrown in the basket. The apple is dropped from enough height additionally to be damaged afterwards.
- hosh 5y ago
  Honeycrisps are notorious for that, being big and bruising easily. However, there are some apple varieties that are more resistant to bruising. Red Delicious has a thick skin that resists bruising, though they also taste terrible. Cosmic Crisp was recently developed and made commercially available, a cross of a Honeycrisp and other varities so that it better resists bruising and stores for longer. I'm interested in the compressed air technology though. I remember Disney experimenting with that as part of an effort to make their animitronics safe for interaction with people. There are also some things I know from internal martial arts that I wonder about applying to robotics.
helios_invictus 5y ago
Dear Robot, please bruise my apples some more.
kgwgk 5y ago
Does it pluck an Apple or an apple?
- isitworthit 5y ago
  I was thinking about the impact on the economy when an Apple is getting plucked every 7 seconds
  - libria 5y ago
    Looking at the 2020 stats, customers were plucking 6 iPhones per second so only 1 every 7 seconds would be a disastrous year for Apple. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/
abledon 5y ago
holy... this is going to have huge implications for importing cheap foreign labour into the farming industry.
helloguillecl 5y ago
I have a question: How could I get started into robotics as a programmer?
- kneel 5y ago
  build a 3d printer
Toutouxc 5y ago
The webpage shows a modal window with the following text: Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news! and two options: "Subscribe" and "I am already a subscriber" That's like the "No, thanks, I am stupid" dark pattern, but somehow more stupid and less dark.
hinkley 5y ago
Something organic gardeners know is that 'mechanical pest control' otherwise known as killing the bugs by hand, often is the most effective but it can be hard on your back. And the thing is that orchardists already have expensive harvesting equipment. Tech over and over again likes to fix 'greenfield' problems and then act like most of their target audience isn't 'brownfield'. If you wait long enough that becomes true, but you get a lot of nasty surprises that should not be surprising at all in the near term. A caterpillar picker or an aphid squisher might be a better use for automation. Hell a caterpillar spotter that can classify species without even touching them might be useful enough.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Can it not just place the apples down without dropping them that hard?
- hinkley 5y ago
  Existing harvesting equipment often has a tarp or net set at an angle which both funnels and slows down the falling fruits. If you want to speed up this robot it'll be using a net or a chute of some sort so that the hand is freed up while the previous piece of fruit is still being collected.
zwieback 5y ago
This one seems more promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhswzqyVuLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhswzqyVuLw Articulated arm robots are neat but it take a lot to make them efficient.
chrismcb 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this is plucking a fruit and not an iOS device. Can we lower case the word apple in the title? As it should be based on the original title?
wayneftw 5y ago
A bit of off topic trivia: I'm betting the title was entered by an iOS user because the only word capitalized out of place is Apple. They don't even let you type the words App Store without auto capitalizing it for you even though they are not the only app store and they really don't have a trademark on it.

32 points by aerophilic 5y ago

There has been an incredible amount of innovation in the food to consumer supply chain. But despite this cost savings, the prices for food keeps on going up. Who’s absorbing all that extra value?

nerdponx 5y ago
I always heard that food price fluctuations were dicated mostly by weather events and fuel prices.
virtue3 5y ago
I've asked the same question when we saw all the people at the bank disappear to be replaced by computers (you can look at like scenes from older movies with TONS of people at the bank doing processing I assume). Robots, unfortunately, move capital from labor to owners. I'm not proposing robots are bad. You're kinda screwed once they're out in the wild, if you don't adopt them you can't stay in business eventually (without some sort of pivot to a niche market segment).
- thdxr 5y ago
  In a competitive environment automation doesn't actually help business make money. The increased margin quickly gets turned into discounts that competitors will trade to grab more marketshare. Areas where there is automation but prices continue to go up have issues with competition - banks are a great example because banking licenses are impossible to acquire.
  - virtue3 5y ago
    Really great insight. I would even add in for automation for cars or heavy manufacturing: they increase the cost of getting into the game: thus driving down competition as well.
- TulliusCicero 5y ago
  People don't explicitly pay for bank accounts anymore -- remember when "free checking" was a big deal? So it actually did have some benefits for consumers.
  - virtue3 5y ago
    I feel like that was... in the 90s? BoA is still only free if you have direct deposit or some such I'm pretty sure. The automation started in the late 70s at least tho. The other child comment about banks and lack of competition I think really hits this on the head.
- hosh 5y ago
  That's an interesting line of thought. That sparked a different one: Carol Sanford had been talking about "value-adding" for a long time. Not in the sense of "value-added" (such as packaging, or productizing), but in the sense that additional value is created. How can automation add value instead of capturing existing value through better efficiency?
  - virtue3 5y ago
    Interesting, can you elaborate on your question? all of my initial thoughts tend to focus more on better quality assurance etc; which I think is more about efficiency than anything else.
    - hosh 5y ago
      What can you do with the technology that you could not before, that benefits our civilization? I once heard this example using coffee beans. If you buy coffee beans, and you have to brew it, that's a commodity. When you go to a coffee shop, and the server brews it for you and brings it to you, that's a service. When you have one of those single-server instant coffee that you pop into the machine, and it brews it for you, that's a product. The distance between you and the original commodity can be defined as the number of transformations from the coffee plant to your cup. Raw beans that you have to process yourself is closer to the original plant. A service provider inserts themselves into that process of brewing a coffee, and charge you for it. Productizing it so you don't even have to wait on someone else to do it for you inserts additional steps -- packaging, technology, etc. We call this "value-added", meaning that some merchant captures the value from transformational steps that you would have otherwise have to do yourself. However, I am talking about "value-adding". The key difference here is that the transformation changes the commodity in a way that contributes something beyond what you could have done yourself, not simply capturing existing value in the value chain. I think most use of technology and automation are attempting to capture existing value rather than creating value that was not there before. Network effect of the internet might be value-adding, but we have also seen the same network-effect used to aggregate and capture large swaths of the market without contributing anything back (Facebook, for example). Is the network effect of Amazon's logistics prowess value-adding? And if it is, what unintended consequences have we seen from it? It may also be that, for computing, we would have to look at older generations of our software and look for the forks not taken. As an example, Apple's Hypercard enabled individuals to create their own computing experience, something that could not have been done before without it and other systems like it ... and it was deliberately dropped so that all design came from Apple (iPhones, iPads, etc.). By the metric of return on shareholder value, that decision was wildly successful. But in terms of adding value for our civilization, was it? AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero demonstrated that humans can no longer beat AI Go players. If you are willing to spend energy to power all those TPUs, they can play far beyond the best human players. That shook up a lot of the pros. Some of the top players have quit. However, other players got more excited. They saw Go being played in ways they had never seen before. People who made their living tutoring Go to other people have lost their livelihood. On the other hand, Isee discussion at the high amateur ranks now uses Leela Zero, or Katago to learn and explore the game. That's a positive contribution that could not be done before. (And the shadowside: it is easier for people to cheat; though if you are using Go to develop your own intellectual ability to evaluate and make decisions, using an AI to play competitively is kinda cheating yourself).
jakearmitage 5y ago
Shipping?
bpodgursky 5y ago
My semi-conspiracy theory is that we're in de-facto hyperinflation already (visible in education, healthcare, housing), but it's being masked by wild productivity improvements in agriculture and basic manufacturing which keep inflation at a nominal 2%.

krasin 5y ago

This is a nice proof of concept, but it's not anywhere production-ready. For instance, this apple harvester is using UR5 robot arm. It's a very research-friendly robot that I like to work with, but it's nowhere ready for outdoors. Its reach is just shy of 1 meter -- not practical for apples as well. Their choice to place an Intel RealSense camera on the wrist of the robot means that they have a USB cable running through the robot. My experience shows that even heavy-duty cables only work for hundreds of hours in such a mode and then require a replacement. The soft gripper that they use is a good choice for the task, but it depends on compressed air, which means an extra tube running through the robot arm - usually it means even more maintenance required. Still, this approach can be productionized, but the end result might look very different from this prototype.

skinner927 5y ago
What kind of data transmission line can be used for this type of environment?
- krasin 5y ago
  Many robot arms provide robust RS-485 and (in some cases) Ethernet and have all wires plumbed inside the arm (so, little to no maintenance). In certain non-critical cases (like, agriculture), wireless can be used too, for instance, when there's a strong urge to transfer more video data than the internal link allows for.
swiley 5y ago
It's a huge improvement over where we were. I remember being told that picking fruit at all was very hard/impossible for robots even in a lab.
mysterydip 5y ago
Would wifi or bluetooth have enough bandwidth to transfer camera data? That would remove the high maintenance cable from the equation at least.
- 5y ago

tpmx 5y ago

I'm guesstimating that a human worker plucks an apple every 1-2 seconds, sustained?

99_00 5y ago
At least some of the time it seems they just shake the tree and catch the apples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeqf3ZY-V-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeqf3ZY-V-I
- tpmx 5y ago
  I can't imagine that working well for apples being sold in supermarkets to consumers? For juice/cider/etc though...
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Things are getting better, but a lot of the fruit you eat is selected for shelf and processing stability. Flavor is a secondary concern, and nutrition isn't considered at all. Some people think the latter is part of the obesity epidemic. We have lots of cravings when we are malnourished, and while hyper palatable food can explain a lot of this, it's not the only culprit. Those peaches you eat are the only ones you can get because the others bruise too easily. If you want a 'better' peach you're going to have to plant a tree. It's one of the 'sales pitches' that gardeners and permaculturists use to try to convert people. If you want more nutritious vegatables, you're going to have to get your hands dirty. Vine-ripened foods can be a profoundly different experience than store bought, as anyone who has ever grown a tomato will be all too quick to tell you.
    - smabie 5y ago
      I used to live in Tanzania and while none of the produce or fruit looks very good, it tastes maybe 10x better than anything in America. When I first moved there I was absolutely shocked by how good the fruits/vegetables and even corn tasted.
CuriouslyC 5y ago

temp667 5y ago

With the billions amazon and apple sell you think they would be automating their warehouses more. Ie, pick steps at least - particularly given the description of Amazon warehouses as "hell holes" relative to other warehouse and physical labor jobs (small owner run construction / warehouse / autobody can also have horrendous discrimination / harassment etc stuff, but perhaps better than the amazon alternative?). I've seen restaurant owners hire folks to hit on them in particular. Maybe an industry thing? Music / film ideally doesn't have that issue but less exposure to that world.

dcanelhas 5y ago

Let me show you a similar system from 2017 that aims to pick bell peppers for a bit of context around what the state of the art in autonomous fruit harvesting looks like: https://research.qut.edu.au/future-farming/projects/harvey-the-robotic-capsicum-sweet-pepper-harvester/ https://research.qut.edu.au/future-farming/projects/harvey-t... "In early 2017, worldwide literature indicated a success rate of only 6% in testing scenarios similar to those used for Harvey, and up to 30% when the crop is modified and leaves are removed." Picking one apple every 7 seconds is not bad, I'd say.

legulere 5y ago

In the video there's 15 seconds between the to Apples being thrown in the basket. The apple is dropped from enough height additionally to be damaged afterwards.

hosh 5y ago
Honeycrisps are notorious for that, being big and bruising easily. However, there are some apple varieties that are more resistant to bruising. Red Delicious has a thick skin that resists bruising, though they also taste terrible. Cosmic Crisp was recently developed and made commercially available, a cross of a Honeycrisp and other varities so that it better resists bruising and stores for longer. I'm interested in the compressed air technology though. I remember Disney experimenting with that as part of an effort to make their animitronics safe for interaction with people. There are also some things I know from internal martial arts that I wonder about applying to robotics.

helios_invictus 5y ago

Dear Robot, please bruise my apples some more.

kgwgk 5y ago

Does it pluck an Apple or an apple?

isitworthit 5y ago
I was thinking about the impact on the economy when an Apple is getting plucked every 7 seconds
- libria 5y ago
  Looking at the 2020 stats, customers were plucking 6 iPhones per second so only 1 every 7 seconds would be a disastrous year for Apple. [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/apple-statistics/

abledon 5y ago

holy... this is going to have huge implications for importing cheap foreign labour into the farming industry.

helloguillecl 5y ago

I have a question: How could I get started into robotics as a programmer?

kneel 5y ago
build a 3d printer

Toutouxc 5y ago

The webpage shows a modal window with the following text: Sign up for our daily Newsletter and stay up to date with all the latest news! and two options: "Subscribe" and "I am already a subscriber" That's like the "No, thanks, I am stupid" dark pattern, but somehow more stupid and less dark.

hinkley 5y ago

Something organic gardeners know is that 'mechanical pest control' otherwise known as killing the bugs by hand, often is the most effective but it can be hard on your back. And the thing is that orchardists already have expensive harvesting equipment. Tech over and over again likes to fix 'greenfield' problems and then act like most of their target audience isn't 'brownfield'. If you wait long enough that becomes true, but you get a lot of nasty surprises that should not be surprising at all in the near term. A caterpillar picker or an aphid squisher might be a better use for automation. Hell a caterpillar spotter that can classify species without even touching them might be useful enough.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Can it not just place the apples down without dropping them that hard?

hinkley 5y ago
Existing harvesting equipment often has a tarp or net set at an angle which both funnels and slows down the falling fruits. If you want to speed up this robot it'll be using a net or a chute of some sort so that the hand is freed up while the previous piece of fruit is still being collected.

zwieback 5y ago

This one seems more promising: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhswzqyVuLw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhswzqyVuLw Articulated arm robots are neat but it take a lot to make them efficient.

chrismcb 5y ago

I'm pretty sure this is plucking a fruit and not an iOS device. Can we lower case the word apple in the title? As it should be based on the original title?

wayneftw 5y ago

A bit of off topic trivia: I'm betting the title was entered by an iOS user because the only word capitalized out of place is Apple. They don't even let you type the words App Store without auto capitalizing it for you even though they are not the only app store and they really don't have a trademark on it.