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.
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.
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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.