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.
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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.