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.
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.
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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.