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The $210,000 cow-milking robot
- cstross 14y agoMy favourite anecdote about cow milking robots comes from a consultant who was dealing with them from the other end. It turns out that the udder-recognition software isn't perfect, and fails to find the udder some of the time. Farmers noticed this. Then they noticed that the software release cycle for the robot took more than 10 months. As that's the gestation period for a cow, they worked out that it would be faster to breed cows with udders that were easier for the existing recognizer to identify, than to wait for the robot manufacturers to upgrade their firmware ...