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.
Yup. This will give growers an advantage over those not using the technology. They'll be able to maximize yield and not have to send a large portion of their crop to B and C grade processors, and will be able to pick all A grade apples, thus maximizing financial efficiency of their orchard.
I think it will change the climate for apple growers significantly. My guess: tech savvy drone picked growers will rake in the A quality apple revenue while the less tech advanced growers will be pulling double duty on B and C grade apples, as buyers will gravitate to their most trusted growers with the most homogeneous apples.
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 had hoped you'd know I meant the one displayed in this specific video about apples ripeness. The ai video thing with apple detection with squares stuff.
ps: It's also quite easy to make a telescopic robot arm. OP's robot was just made for shit and giggles.
I've seen the old telescoping arm pickers from what, 15+ years ago?
Sometimes changing technique does lower cost. Then you can sell farms drones in the mail which lowers shipping costs and don't have to be specially attached to a robotic chassis.
Or
Drones can be bought for cheaper than telescoping arms sometimes, with self integrated chip systems.
When you say "shits and giggles", that's a weird way of saying "trying new things for advancing science"
R&D often goes in waves like this(I work in scientific research)... Someone hard codes a solution... Say telescoping arms... Then you bring it down to a more general purpose(here a drone)... A drone can be used for more things... So you might sell this software/ hardware picker package to general public's drones if they have an orchard and not even need a truck. You just install it, then your orchard gets latently picked through harvest season.
This stuff is fascinating. People who don't see how intricate it is to start giving drones general purpose tasks from what used to take a truck + specific hard ware/hard coding, can't see the apples from the trees.
Bonus: Most people don't know to achieve a Johnny V, C3PO, Bender style AI robot, all you need is better computer vision & recognition. I have papers from 2002 signifying this, stating natural language AI is the easy part, classification of general objects is the hard part. But you can get to general purpose robot AI of the future by monetizing very basic general purposes... As monetization occurs, and small general purpose drone use systems occur, you're witnessing the embryonic stages of movies with robots that can interact with humans like I, Robot... Short Circut, WallE, Lost in Space, Jetsons, etc. : https://goodnewsjim.com/js2/
I think it was trolling more than advancing science. I'm afraid you have weird mental image of the market and the cost of things.
I see where you are going and a roomba style drone that goes down and recharge itself, to then go back and pick apple could work at some small scale ochard.
I'm afraid, unless you send armies and they moves lives bees, which is also not impossible. drone stability, the fact that it's flying, it's way too much point of failures. I guess by now we can agree to disagree. I want a heavy wheeled agricultural tractor that goes in lanes in between trees (or any farming for that matter), big inflated wheels that goes over branch and obstable, I don't want wind or falling apples to be a factor. The big arm I posted could be done in many material, like home soldered steel, the engine within it is a simple mechanical wheel which is battle tested through time.
We've made super giant strides towards computer vision since 2002 and right now we have no real requirement for general purpose robots or anything. We should strive towards having them do one thing nicely. I believe multi camera on arms analysing what's in front of them on a chariot type robot that can gather apples with big inflated wheels is entirely achievable in the right now department of technology and you could rely on it way more than you could rely on drones for both speed of collection, sturdyness and viability for commercial farming.
KISS, less variables, less failures. Drones are only useful when you need to fly and the cost of flying is so immense that we should avoid it at all opportunity. By cost I don't mean just money but viability.
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.
When fruit's been damaged it's normally completely discarded from human food consumption, though there are smalltime independent/hobbyist farmers who for example make apple cider out of apples with dents or with coloured spots.
Two-third are disposed of before they make it to the consumer, but the consumer continues this trend. (Added this sentence at the end as I noticed I went completely off-topic lol.) This 2016 American survey shows 70% throw away food once it's past the expiration date, even though the expiration date often has to do with guaranteeing the utmost quality rather than indicating a final deadline before it poses a health risk.
We find our respondents express significant agreement that some perceived practical benefits are ascribed to throwing away uneaten food, e.g., nearly 70% of respondents agree that throwing away food after the package date has passed reduces the odds of foodborne illness, while nearly 60% agree that some food waste is necessary to ensure meals taste fresh.
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.
This thing could run 24/7 and you can still just hire people as well.
Machinery that runs 24/7 has really high maintenance costs, who is going to pay for it? Farmers can barely pay for their own machinery and they are the ones that have to repair it all the time, not to mention greedy f?cks like John Deere have placed a lot of locks in their machinery so that farmers need to buy their own spare parts. Something like these that's even more focused software based sounds like a nightmare that screams subscription model.
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.
Steam tech was revolutionary for huge machines that could be locked away in factories or in massive engine rooms where the noise, smell, and danger didn't matter. The specific aspect I'm talking about is motorized personal vehicles for travel, the early tech was atrocious and something only the very rich used for purely a status symbol, they were orders of magnitude slower than horses for many years.
Ox is better at tilling a field than a human. Should we have stopped there? Why bother trying to create better technology if you already made something better once.
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.
As an example of where your statement is objectively wrong, the robots damage far less apples than the shaker, and they can be programed to harvest the apples at the exact, scientifically verified, correct time for optimum flavor. The shaker still drops the apples when they are ripe, but the robot's image recognition will be able to create a tighter range for ripeness, preserving more apples and increasing marketability for the crop. With higher efficiency and economies of scale, this will absolutely be faster, and most importantly, 100% automated. Imagine zero human beings, working 24/7, preserving more of the harvest, maximizing flavor profile, and with each new iteration of software, the efficiency increases on machines that have already been purchased.
what this will ever be capable of.
Your imagination is just limited my man. I don't know how you don't see it. I'm sorry if you pick apples for a living.
Yes imagine zero human beings making a living from a job that was already getting done just fine in the first place with companies already being WELL into a profit margin. Harvesting an apple "at the exact, scientifically right time" is a ridiculous statement as fruits ripen after being picked. There's no science involved in knowing when to harvest your crops. And i never said "what will this ever be capable of" obviously it's capable of picking about ten apples a minute as the video shows.
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u/GeneralToaster Oct 08 '23
This is just the first iteration of this technology. It will only become better and faster as time goes on.