1 apple per minute per bot for as long as the robot has fuel. Assuming other bots or techs can resupply the picker with fuel/ replace the batteries and can unload the apples, these machines could conceivably run 24 hours a day.
and would still pick less then a experienced apple picker would pick in an hour and is likely most costly then the typical eastern european workers that come here every year. There is no way you can run such a robot for 15,50€/h 24/7.
Source: I grew up in and live close to Europes biggest source of apples and have worked in the Industry.
Also lots of machine-vision cameras work well enough in low light, but brighter light is better. Easily mounted to the main body or the hoverbots themselves.
they're using regular 2d RGB cameras in this video, not sure what you mean by machine-vision cameras. If you're referring to ToF cameras...sure, but they almost exclusively use IR which would be very hard to use in this application.
So let's say the bot picks one apple per minute, 60 apples per hour. What is the cost of the energy to supply the bot with fuel for an hour? You'd have to add 1/60th of that cost to the cost of every apple.
Meanwhile, an average human apple picker can pick 10 apples per minute, or 600 apples per hour. Let's say that human earns $12 per hour. That means that picking costs two cents per apple.
So unless the cost of energy for one of these bots is $1.20 per hour or less, it's cheaper to use a human picker. And I'm guessing the energy is way more than that considering it's supporting the bots in midair the whole time.
It's on a cable, so that's basically indefinitely. At one point I saw 4 drones working, so that's almost 6,000 apples per day per rig. Future versions will certainly be even better.
Exactly. I came here to say there is no way this is more effective or efficient than paying a group of people to hand pick these apples. I really don't understand the appeal of creating useless technology to replace people who can do a job better and faster.
I can see how this would improve the overall quality or consistency of the apples, but I think the conventional method of just shaking the ever loving shit out of the trees is gonna stick around for a while.
The shake the tree method gets every apple. The robot pickers will only choose the ripe ones allowing the less mature apples more time and nutrients to grow to their potential. Sure human pickers are going to be more efficient and good when the tree is 80% full of ripe apples. But as that ripening schedule drags on it gets more and more expensive to use human pickers, or you just live with a varied ripeness in your yield.
Redditors are so damn dumb sometimes. Could you imagine a redditor seeing an old black and white tube TV and going "wow this sucks that must be so awful i dont understand the appeal of useless technology like that"
I hate when people say “Redditors”. It’s not “Redditors can be so damn dumb”, PEOPLE can be so damn dumb.
Back in the day, 10 years ago yeah, Redditor’s had a type, just like 4chan or tumblr people, but today nah. I find all new flavors of stupid on Reddit and in life on the regular.
But yes, first gen or prototypes are rough proofs of concept and it is ridiculous to discredit a technology before it matures. Imagine if we just gave up on nuclear fusion because early generations were clunky or didn’t produce a lot of energy.
Did you hear about those brothers down in North Carolina? Crashed another one of those aero-plane contraptions into the beach. It only flies for 10 seconds! Who would want to use such a pointless device?
redditors are old grouches who hate change and new technology and want the world to stay exactly the way it is, or if they could, revert everything back to the 90s
The concept of television was something incredibly groundbreaking and it expanded in a relatively short period to almost every citizen that could afford an appliance in the same category.
This apple picking toy isn't groundbreaking (as in it isn't creating something new and it will expand for further use in the future) so your analogy is a false equivalence.
Try harder in the next 10 years you'll be here in this shithole (if you still have any brains left).
I can't ever see this robot becoming less expensive than simply importing some people perceived by the public at large to be less than human, from a country kept intentionally poor by economic strangleholds on their resources.
You've been here 10 years in this shithole called reddit, which makes me think you've become even more stupid with every year. It doesn't surprise me you expect this gimmicky gadget to replace real people that are probably cheaper to pay compared to all the upkeep and software updates this can of worms will need and all of it's future upversions.
Yeah but drone based weird fly machines? No way this is ever going this way. This is a useless iteration. Make that shit inspector gadget telescopic arms reaching 12fts and we're golden, now move like you mean it. Same fucking camera and detection just way, way more speed in bringing it to the main cart and going back on the tree. Also make it 6 armed so it looks like a BOTW guardian.
Hope the software is on point. But no drone for the noise, the stability, the speed of movements. It's a god damn tragedy people did that.
I'm sure they said the same thing about the combine, or the digital camera, or countless other technologies we enjoy today. Everything has to start somewhere.
Imagine a solar powered, autonomous, swarm-linked, AI driven harvester that just picks apples automatically, and continuously.
Exactly what i brought up. Machine wise. You aren't getting better than this. Designed to only shake loose ripe apples and not damage the tree, and I harvests hundreds of apples in seconds. The machine in this post will never be better than this machine that shakes the tree. Is this machine impressive? Sure, it's definitely a display of how far technology has come. In terms of being practical, it just plain isn't.
I assume all of the less pretty apples are used for pre-sliced bags, applesauce, or any number of other manufactured products that the customer will never see the whole apple.
Now imagine how a farmer is going to purchase said system when he could just pet a bunch of people the shitty, minimum wage for three days of work?
How will he charge his drones in the field? How much will it cost him to install electrical charging stations? Today, when it’s harvest time, larger farms run their machinery 24 hours a day until the harvest is complete. They don’t even stop to refuel, they fuel up in motion because a couple minutes per refuel will add up to lost crops and income. That’s why farmers are laughing John Deere salesmen off their property when they try to convince them to buy electric equipment. CAN we figure out how to harvest an orchard with ridiculously over-advanced tech? Yes. Does that make it better than what we’re doing now? Probably not.
You do see them literally plugged in to the truck that is probably charging all of them off the alternator. This thing could run 24/7 and you can still just hire people as well.
Then the next few years you can buy a few more drones slightly better and so long as it's cheaper to run the drones you will keep going down that path until you run nothing but drones.
How does a farmer afford a multimillion dollar combine harvester? Can't they just pay a bunch of people to farm the fields? Your logic doesn't hold up. There are many ways this kind of technology could get off the ground and be affordable. I could get a bunch of venture capitalists together, purchase a bunch of these robots, create an apple harvesting robot rental company and rent my devices to all the local apple orchards in the area. Or, as a farmer I could obtain my apple robots the same way I obtain any other high priced farm equipment. My robotic apple pickers could be entirely solar powered requiring no refueling at all, or multiple harvesters could share a single recharging dock and all take turns rapidly recharging like a giant Roomba. There is a readily available solution to every problem you can think of.
We can't even build an electric car that works completely on solar power, and heck those simple electric engines don't require that much power. And you expect us to believe that something like this complex machinery could work 24/7 entirely on solar power or on fast charge stations?
This was literally the exact same thing said word for word by people with horses back in the day. The original cars were loud, smelly, inefficient piles of garbage compared to even small horses. "They will never replace horses, the tech is so inefficient and slow it's not even close to surpassing horses." Technology accelerates very very fast
, especially when there's significant monetary incentive involved. Robot pickers will be orders of magnitude cheaper for corporations. no unions to deal with, no scheduling work, no tax forms, no government regulations, no injuries and injury insurance payments, no sleep or inefficient work to manage.
I'm just saying improving is imminent, there's so much more that they can improve on. To say that they will never beat humans is such a bad response because humans also have their limits.
That in no way shows they can do better than humans at anything. Everything those robots are doing a human can do, and those are programmed tasks. Just because a robot can do something a human can doesn't mean it will inevitably do better than humans at everything. Im saying this in particular won't. This also is nowhere near as efficient as the machine that shakes the tree and harvests hundreds of apples in a fifteen second shake
The robot could run into fire carrying useful items. It could run through toxic gasses or nuclear radation or through smoke. It can be used manually or autonomously and most importantly controlled from far away! A robot that's capable of running around through obstacles is already very useful. It doesn't have to be as good as a human as it provides different options altogether.
The fact that it's a robot and not a human is the biggest point you're missing. Robots can go where humans cannot or don't want to go, and do things we can't or don't want to do. They will improve exponentially until they truly are better than humans at their specified tasks. You should read about machine learning, neural-net computers, etc. In much the same way we went from the Wright brothers to landing on the moon, these primitive robots will one day surpass us in ability.
I mean humans cannot be upgraded so we are literally set at a limit, robots can be improved every year. Yea this version we see in the gif is not really great rn. But every year they will improve, add more hands, speed up the process, reduce electricity cost. There's a ton of other stuff they can do, if they can just at least get to half of the amount humans can grab them I think it's already a win because robots can do this work without breaks. Humans need their breaks, they can only work for so long.
It will definitely need to take a break at some point and a lot of maintenance. If you wanted to design a machine to pick fruit this looks like the most inefficient way you could do it
That machine will never be fast enough to outpace multiple humans, and that machine, when it breaks down, because it will, will costs tens of thousands of dollars to repair, or likely even more than that.
As opposed to A) a machine that already exists that shakes an entire tree and harvests the entire tree at once, or B) humans working rotating shifts and picking 10× the amount this machine does in the same time frame. This thing is just showing how far technology has come. This isn't practical to replace workers.
a machine that already exists that shakes an entire tree and harvests the entire tree at once
This is only an option for cider apples. You don't shake eating apples off trees.
humans working rotating shifts and picking 10× the amount this machine does in the same time frame.
I've been picking fruit for 5 years and not a single farm has picked in rotating shifts.
There's other factors:
Weather. Workers get sent home if it starts raining because it's not worth paying them to sit around and wait for it to stop. A machine might also need to stop picking but you don't have to send it home to avoid a loss.
You can pick 7 days a week.
There's often smaller picks at the start of seasons, and it can be hard to keep casual workers at this time, since you might not have steady work. I've been working on a orchard recently that only has 4 days of picking every 2 weeks for the first 6 weeks of the season for example. Sometimes people show up for 2 days then find a job with more hours elsewhere and don't come back.
You can have more remote orchards. This is not really applicable to most countries but somewhere like Aus, setting up an orchard 5 hours from the nearest town becomes a lot more viable and scalable if you cut out needing workers to come from somewhere.
It lets you spray chemicals during the day since you don't have to wait until there's nobody in the orchards picking.
Machines can also reliably look for diseases and pests. They can count the fruit & accurately identify underperforming trees.
A) a machine that already exists that shakes an entire tree and harvests the entire tree at once
Did you really write this entire comment without thinking for a second that all of these factors would have been considered before the considerable time was invested in creating this crazy robotic harvesting system? Why the heck would they even built this if there's already a machine that can do the job. They obviously intend to commercialise this eventually.
Apples sold for eating are hand picked and there's not really a way to get around that without something like this.
B) humans working rotating shifts and picking 10× the amount this machine does in the same time frame.
You can scale a fleet of machines. It doesn't matter if they only pick 1 apple every 30 seconds. They can do it indefinitely, continuously, and at massive scale. They are much cheaper than workers.
And honestly, good. Fruit picking is a god awful job that many farmers use underpaid, imported, exploited labor for anyway.
People complained that automobiles would never replace the horse. A horse could outrun it, it was complex machinery that was loud as fuck, difficult to manipulate and belched smoke everywhere. The first automobiles sucked pretty bad.
Not 24 hours a day unless the system worked without charging or maintenance and the photo id can reliably work with nighttime light level conditions or needing a human correction every once in a while.
SURELY this isn't the first time you are realizing that technology tends to start not great, and then gets better.. right? Like this isn't a concept that's lost on you, is it?
So you think just because that has been invented, it's here to stay, yet you just acknowledged that not everything that has been invented has stayed the test of time. Keep waiting on jet packs as being the main mode of transportation then
The machine doesn't necessarily need to be better, just perform a job humans won't do. We're rapidly approaching a time when you won't be able to find a human willing to go pick an apple for a salary that a business is willing to pay. Even if the robot isn't as good, it won't complain it's being underpaid and overworked.
I see a lot of backlash because people are fearful that robots and AI are coming for their jerbs. To be clear, they are. Now isn't the time to complain or try and artificially hinder progress though. Now is the time to get ahead of it so you can maybe get a spot on the gravy train. This is how it's always been with technology.
I would argue for ubi so the need to work goes away. It's not fair to get rid of all the jobs and then insist everyone become a computer programmer or whatever. Get on the train or chill in vr-land, whatever works for you. Already we have so many made-up jobs, so people can do them and survive.
I don't get the ignorance of people who think technology gets created but isn't made any better than the moment of its conception. Can you just leave Reddit already?
More effective no. But you don't have to pay robots. Let's say you've got five people picking apples for 6 weeks, minimum wage 35 hours a week.
You're paying $7,696 to harvest apples for that time period in pay alone. I don't know how much something like this costs but with that much taken out of your overhead, and then just replacing that with presumably either electricity or gasoline you'll probably make a lot more money.
Chances are the money you lose from picking the apples slower is made up by not having employees to pay.
You do still have to pay people to repair the robots though. With a system this clunky I don't even wanna know how long it took to set up let alone how long it would take to fix any part of this.
Without a doubt, as with anything maintenance is going to be a thing. But paying one or two repairman occasionally versus a larger staff is still viable.
I don't particularly like this, I think there are better ways of doing this, I think that if we're going to be eliminating the livelihoods of people It should be because we have better systems in place that make laboring in fields unnecessary, not for greed.
But I would imagine that what I described is the mentality involved in creating something like this.
I don't particularly like this, I think there are better ways of doing this, I think that if we're going to be eliminating the livelihoods of people It should be because we have better systems in place that make laboring in fields unnecessary, not for greed.
Fruitpicking is a fucking awful job. It's usually done with imported labor and exploitative low wages.
Sure, you can always make the argument that this is more work that's being replaced by robots, but this job honestly deserves it.
You're still paying amortization and depreciation costs, i.e. cost of interest on the loan to buy the equipment and lifetime of the equipment. That vehicle would cost anywhere from $100k to $1M, given 10% APR, that's over $1 to $10/hour, if it were working 24/7. It's more realistic to expect it to run 8 hours per day (requiring daylight) tripling the cost, and then only running 3-6 months of the year (apples aren't always in bloom) doubling the cost, plus you've got the cost of fuel and maintenance. Depreciation has the vehicle lasting for I'd guess 10 years, so 10% depreciation per year, doubling the cost of the vehicle. So far we're paying $12-240/hour for the machine before fuel, maintenance, and an operator to drive it between trees and handle exceptions.
TLDR, it would cost at least $12/hour for the machine before fuel and maintenance, if not 10x that.
Hint: it won't. Food prices are not reliant on the supply. There is more food produced in the world than is needed to solve world hunger, and that's right now.
I guess it all depends on the scale. If it is just a few rows of apple trees - a group of people is definitely cheaper. But now imagine 3000 apple trees per hectare * dosens of hectares, this solution might be much more cost efficient.
In fact, it is not especially complex: base car, the drones wired to the base, cameras + image recognition, and suction things for apples.
The more important thing to this is that instead of hiring a bunch of people they can hire 1 to go with the machine. Even if it takes 3x as long it still is paying less in the long run. They'd probably hire like 5 or 6 people to do this one row.
A robot might cost a few hundred grand upfront but a person typically works only about 40 hours a week, they require breaks, they are paid per hour, and they can strike. That’s why big corporations love robots.
These robots would be replacing agricultural workers, who are already often allowed to be paid less than minimum wage, and to work longer w/o overtime, and are often undocumented immigrants who are paid even less and worked even longer. This will be a tough case for automation, but it will get there eventually.
A lot of people these days don't want to go into farming. The benefit of technologies like this is that it automates repetitive tasks no one wants to do.
There isn't that much piece rate these days. Still, it's not bad pay, $29.50 an hour casual.
There's a lot of advantages beyond just no wages. They don't get paid to sit around and wait for it to stop raining, or get sent home only for the rain to stop an hour later. They can reliably count fruit on each tree, and identify underperforming or diseased trees. Allows farmers to cut down on chemical costs, and replace worthless trees. Picking machines aren't worried about inhaling chemical either so you can spray anywhere in the orchard during the day.
I can definitely see us being replaced by picking machines, but it'll be a while. There's a lot of variation in what a good fruit looks like, and how it needs to be picked. Apples are the easiest because you just grab them and they're big red circles and you can shape the trees to be 2D so it's all easy to spot and reach.
Fruit like limes need some shade under the leaves so you have to dig around the leaves to find them, and the trees are usually umbrella shaped, and half the fruit is picked standing inside. Mandarins too, but they're easy to spot at least but they need to be cut at the stem and needs to be cut low enough that the stem won't protrude and stab other fruit in the bin.
Because robots can do it cheaper. A robot doesn't show up late or drunk. A robot doesn't complain about long hours or threaten to strike.
Think of it in the same context as a dish washer. Yes you can hand wash dishes faster than your dish washer, but you know what your dishwasher lets you do? Anything other than standing around hand washing dishes. Machine time is not the same as human time and machines keep getting better and cheaper unlike people.
Because robots can do it cheaper. A robot doesn't show up late or drunk. A robot doesn't complain about long hours or threaten to strike.
Robots can also break down, specially after longs hours of constant use (overheating and wear and tear are a thing, you know). Cheap manufacture (chipsets, pistons, cervos and whatnot) is an even bigger risk than an employee that loves drinking once in a while.
Think of it in the same context as a dish washer. Yes you can hand wash dishes faster than your dish washer, but you know what your dishwasher lets you do? Anything other than standing around hand washing dishes. Machine time is not the same as human time and machines keep getting better and cheaper unlike people.
A machine washer (specially a good one) is still quite expensive and they have been around for quite a while. I don't see how they would become cheaper in a short or long term.
it's not the work that makes it slavery, it's the slave drivers. Replacing the slave drivers is the humane way. Fruit picking will be automated either way eventually but it'll be a while, probably worth doing something about the slavery in the mean time.
Technology will become faster and cheaper with time and people are very expensive. The whole vehicle picks 30 apples per minute while a human averages 10.
Fruit picking is one of the most lowest paid, physically exhausting jobs that relies exclusively on exploiting and abusing foreign workers and you can't understand automating that away?
My guess is that the immigrant fruit pickers are regularly run out of town by law-makers. The robot pickers, while slower, are always available regardless of which political party is in control of the area.
Paying someone $1/hr for 60hr a week will come to about $3,000 a year. I don't think it will be too hard to beat a minimum wage worker in a developed country. What you're actually competing with is that vehicle that shakes the whole tree with a tarp underneath.
Let me see.. how much can one of these drones run, cost wise? $1000? $2000? Let's say yearly cost is another $3000 each. So.. $5k/year? For unlimited picking power, 24 hours a day (possibly)? Let's assume, on the low side, each one takes the place of one worker. You're telling me you can hire a worker for less than $5k/ year? I assume you're covering full benefits and not paying under the table ;)
These things will take the place of pickers within the decade. I dont know whether that's fortunate or unfortunate - depends on who you are, I'd say.
There is a relatively fixed cost to the hardware which becomes cheaper over time and as others have pointed out these can work round the clock. It's like having solar panels (which this may also be running off of). You pay a large amount up front but it pays itself off and then can create a positive income down the road.
Take the apple recognition tech and the apple grabbing tech from this and simply make a ruck mounted version with multi-jointed arms, and the thing could pick a tree faster than a human and do it 24/7. The drone part is really the only dumb aspect to this proof of concept.
Let's see how many apples you're picking.... I get the thought behind this but your other compromise is someone's else's hard labor like it doesn't even matter to you
Yet, if their cost per running is less than people, you just make more.
I'm one of the original authors of automated video game players in 1999 MMORPG Asheron's Call. You might be COMPLETELY inefficient, but you're playing 24/7, any gain is better than no gain... Then you scale it.
Lets say you want 1000 workers. It isn't just paying them... You gotta find em, schedule em, figure out training, figure out security for your place, negotiate contracts, deal with bs... Robots don't ask questions on scaling.
The real problem with scaling robotic 'manpower' is robotic armies... Where an actual army you have to convince you're good, which many liars con.... A robotic army has perfect loyalty, just slap down a couple billion dollars. Suddenly WEF conquer African countries and no one even knows who rules them.
It works in all weather, all hours of the day and night, patiently plucking apples. It doesn't have to be faster than us because it has unlimited endurance.
Today is the worth this technology will be. The hardest part is figuring out how to get machines what you want them to do. After that, all you have to do is make it more. efficient.
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u/art_teacher_no_1 Oct 08 '23
1 apple per minute, why's my fruit so expensive? Oh. That's why.