6 ms·

RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes

115 points by smurda 10mo ago

asymmetric 10mo ago
Tangentially related: https://farm.bot/ https://farm.bot/
- GiorgioG 10mo ago
  $5,000-7,000...that's crazy.
  - daemonologist 10mo ago
    What's crazy is that it only does the easy stuff (planting and watering). What we need is a robot to do the hard stuff (in my home-gamer opinion: pest control and weeding; maybe picking is most relevant for commercial agriculture).
    - lukan 10mo ago
      Not sure if it comes out of the box, but it can also do simple pest control and weeding. Mechancical stomping plants at the wrong position or spraying with chemicals. Harvesting would be fine for me to do by hand, because that is indeed he really hard part, especially with mixed crops.
dekhn 10mo ago
I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this, because they are duplicating existing things (ag companies already do this), making hardware that would never survive the field (ag companies already solved this), and obscenely expensive (ag companies come up with better cheaper solutions).
- 9rx 10mo ago
  > I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this Do they? Academia is about the individual. It is not about others. Sometimes what an academic comes up with ends up being applicable to a larger audience, but that's not the goal. Industry is where people try to do things for others.
  - dekhn 10mo ago
    I mean, if you're an academic and you don't care if anybody uses your technology, that's fine, I guess, but the folks publishing these papers want the industry to use their ideas: "In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots." is the very first sentence.
    - 9rx 10mo ago
      That's a product of coming up through a school system that emphasizes writing engaging content to please teachers. "Oh no, the farmers can't find help" sounds alarming and draws you in. But as you point out, it ends there. Beyond that, the academic goes off and does whatever is interesting to him personally without concern for what anyone else might actually need. And fair enough. He'd be working in industry if he were trying to please others. And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
      - dekhn 10mo ago
        I mean, many of us in academia (I was previously) have made things for industry only to learn that we ignored something important and obvious that was already known. I wish I could find the nice article that gave a bunch of examples of papers and concluded "John Deere already sells this product and it's being used at scale today; if you want to do better, at least be aware of what's going on in the field"
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
zzzeek 10mo ago
> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots. This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized. So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue. [1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprofile/english-version-country-profiles/543654/japan-tentatively-opens-its-doors-to-international-care-workers/ https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...
- standardUser 10mo ago
  I agree about immigration, but the world has a large amount of very fertile land in places with very high costs of living. Bringing in large numbers of new immigrants at ultra low pay will have big consequences in most high-cost countries. It's worked well in the US, but that's because of our (former) identity as a nation of immigrants and the massive overlap between US and Latin American culture. In other nations, the outcome could very well be a racially/culturally incompatible underclass working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.
  - zzzeek 10mo ago
    but Japan is actually relaxing immigration rules due to the need for younger workers. I bet they can pay them pretty well for less than the R&D, maintenance, and loss of productivity of the robots costs
    - tracker1 10mo ago
      Long term.. not sure that I agree. The cost of creating robots is going to go down. It's already relatively cheap to produce most of the robot, it's more down to the software development itself at this point. Also, even if a robot costs 2x what you would pay a person in a year at half the speed of a person, that robot can work effectively 4x as many hours a week as a person can. My bigger concern to me is a conglomerate like ConAgra for robot farming comes in and only leases access to these machines instead of being able to buy/maintain/adapt them on the farms themselves. Leading to one more point of pressure against smaller farms in favor of larger conglomerates squeezing every bit of value from the middle out.
HanClinto 10mo ago
"Tomatoes typically bear fruit in clusters, requiring robots to pick the ripe ones while leaving the rest on the vine, demanding advanced decision-making and control capabilities." At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)? This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for. Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place. Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?
- ac29 10mo ago
  The way greenhouse tomatoes are grown is already pretty robot friendly. See below for a couple examples: https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-g01/ https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-... https://tta-iso.com/innovations/harvai https://tta-iso.com/innovations/harvai
- mcguirep 10mo ago
  > I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for. > Is this already being done? This is, indeed, already something that is done. As I understand it, for tomatoes it's typically for canning varieties, but they're called determinate cultivars[1]. Even with those, I know in processing you still have to discard the occasional fruit that isn't ripe. I imagine this kind of technological solution would also be more useful when picking tomatoes for use as the fresh fruit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinate_cultivar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinate_cultivar
- Hasz 10mo ago
  It is done for entire species. There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues. If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/ https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/ for many fruits you will have never seen before.
ge96 10mo ago
I'm wanting to do this for dead leaves/pruning Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot
tguvot 10mo ago
fruit picking robot (trees, tomatoes, berries) few years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU
metalman 10mo ago
"Robots will automatically harvest tomatoes that are easy to pick, while humans will handle the more challenging fruits." this is EXACTLY the oposite of the way it is supposed to work, and brings to mind agricultural sayings concerning greed and taking unfair advantage, "taking the low hanging fruit", and "cherry picking" with the blame of "inefficiency" going to fall on the plants, and a bigger push to breed "robot friendly" crops or no doubt "cant we just print this shit?"
sbfeibish 10mo ago
In my neck of the woods we use deers. And they work at night too.
wingchen 10mo ago
related company when it comes to agriculture robotics: https://www.beagle-tech.com/ https://www.beagle-tech.com/
rurban 10mo ago
Tomatoes are actually easy to pick by robots. The AI part is using the red part of RGB imaging, moving the arm to the fruit and suck it in. Harder parts are the watering, because that's the part which is always broken. Dutch company. And detecting diseases. Which is the harder AI part my company is doing. Moving the heavy robot around is also not that easy, esp. with the cheap dutch robots.

115 points by smurda 10mo ago

asymmetric 10mo ago

Tangentially related: https://farm.bot/ https://farm.bot/

GiorgioG 10mo ago
$5,000-7,000...that's crazy.
- daemonologist 10mo ago
  What's crazy is that it only does the easy stuff (planting and watering). What we need is a robot to do the hard stuff (in my home-gamer opinion: pest control and weeding; maybe picking is most relevant for commercial agriculture).
  - lukan 10mo ago
    Not sure if it comes out of the box, but it can also do simple pest control and weeding. Mechancical stomping plants at the wrong position or spraying with chemicals. Harvesting would be fine for me to do by hand, because that is indeed he really hard part, especially with mixed crops.

dekhn 10mo ago

I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this, because they are duplicating existing things (ag companies already do this), making hardware that would never survive the field (ag companies already solved this), and obscenely expensive (ag companies come up with better cheaper solutions).

9rx 10mo ago
> I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but they really need to check in with the field before coming up with prototypes like this Do they? Academia is about the individual. It is not about others. Sometimes what an academic comes up with ends up being applicable to a larger audience, but that's not the goal. Industry is where people try to do things for others.
- dekhn 10mo ago
  I mean, if you're an academic and you don't care if anybody uses your technology, that's fine, I guess, but the folks publishing these papers want the industry to use their ideas: "In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots." is the very first sentence.
  - 9rx 10mo ago
    That's a product of coming up through a school system that emphasizes writing engaging content to please teachers. "Oh no, the farmers can't find help" sounds alarming and draws you in. But as you point out, it ends there. Beyond that, the academic goes off and does whatever is interesting to him personally without concern for what anyone else might actually need. And fair enough. He'd be working in industry if he were trying to please others. And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
    - dekhn 10mo ago
      I mean, many of us in academia (I was previously) have made things for industry only to learn that we ignored something important and obvious that was already known. I wish I could find the nice article that gave a bunch of examples of papers and concluded "John Deere already sells this product and it's being used at scale today; if you want to do better, at least be aware of what's going on in the field"

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

zzzeek 10mo ago

> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots. This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized. So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue. [1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprofile/english-version-country-profiles/543654/japan-tentatively-opens-its-doors-to-international-care-workers/ https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...

standardUser 10mo ago
I agree about immigration, but the world has a large amount of very fertile land in places with very high costs of living. Bringing in large numbers of new immigrants at ultra low pay will have big consequences in most high-cost countries. It's worked well in the US, but that's because of our (former) identity as a nation of immigrants and the massive overlap between US and Latin American culture. In other nations, the outcome could very well be a racially/culturally incompatible underclass working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.
- zzzeek 10mo ago
  but Japan is actually relaxing immigration rules due to the need for younger workers. I bet they can pay them pretty well for less than the R&D, maintenance, and loss of productivity of the robots costs
  - tracker1 10mo ago
    Long term.. not sure that I agree. The cost of creating robots is going to go down. It's already relatively cheap to produce most of the robot, it's more down to the software development itself at this point. Also, even if a robot costs 2x what you would pay a person in a year at half the speed of a person, that robot can work effectively 4x as many hours a week as a person can. My bigger concern to me is a conglomerate like ConAgra for robot farming comes in and only leases access to these machines instead of being able to buy/maintain/adapt them on the farms themselves. Leading to one more point of pressure against smaller farms in favor of larger conglomerates squeezing every bit of value from the middle out.

HanClinto 10mo ago

"Tomatoes typically bear fruit in clusters, requiring robots to pick the ripe ones while leaving the rest on the vine, demanding advanced decision-making and control capabilities." At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)? This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for. Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place. Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?

ac29 10mo ago
The way greenhouse tomatoes are grown is already pretty robot friendly. See below for a couple examples: https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-g01/ https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-... https://tta-iso.com/innovations/harvai https://tta-iso.com/innovations/harvai
mcguirep 10mo ago
> I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for. > Is this already being done? This is, indeed, already something that is done. As I understand it, for tomatoes it's typically for canning varieties, but they're called determinate cultivars[1]. Even with those, I know in processing you still have to discard the occasional fruit that isn't ripe. I imagine this kind of technological solution would also be more useful when picking tomatoes for use as the fresh fruit. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinate_cultivar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinate_cultivar
Hasz 10mo ago
It is done for entire species. There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues. If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/ https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/ for many fruits you will have never seen before.

ge96 10mo ago

I'm wanting to do this for dead leaves/pruning Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot

tguvot 10mo ago

fruit picking robot (trees, tomatoes, berries) few years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU

metalman 10mo ago

"Robots will automatically harvest tomatoes that are easy to pick, while humans will handle the more challenging fruits." this is EXACTLY the oposite of the way it is supposed to work, and brings to mind agricultural sayings concerning greed and taking unfair advantage, "taking the low hanging fruit", and "cherry picking" with the blame of "inefficiency" going to fall on the plants, and a bigger push to breed "robot friendly" crops or no doubt "cant we just print this shit?"

sbfeibish 10mo ago

In my neck of the woods we use deers. And they work at night too.

wingchen 10mo ago

related company when it comes to agriculture robotics: https://www.beagle-tech.com/ https://www.beagle-tech.com/

rurban 10mo ago

Tomatoes are actually easy to pick by robots. The AI part is using the red part of RGB imaging, moving the arm to the fruit and suck it in. Harder parts are the watering, because that's the part which is always broken. Dutch company. And detecting diseases. Which is the harder AI part my company is doing. Moving the heavy robot around is also not that easy, esp. with the cheap dutch robots.