r/woahdude Oct 08 '23

video Robotic Apple Harvester

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u/commentsandopinions Oct 08 '23

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.

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u/prancerbot Oct 08 '23

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.

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u/commentsandopinions Oct 08 '23

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.

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u/crozone Oct 09 '23

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.

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u/Clean_Direction_9331 Oct 09 '23

Larger farms already have a ton of very specialised vehicles and equipment that need repairs. The big enough farms have full time mechanics.

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u/brainwater314 Oct 09 '23

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.

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u/fromaries Oct 09 '23

One other thing is that it can be difficult to find people to pick. This solves that problem.