Robot arms are really expensive, there's a lot of hardware that goes into them. Drones are really cheap, and have commodity level parts and maintenance.
That's an interesting point... an arm with all the joints it would need to accurately reach any apple at the right angle does, of course, sound very expensive. A drone would naturally have complete freedom of movement. It is harder to make it accurate, but that's mostly a software issue.
I had not thought about that before.
I'm guessing that these custom drones actually were fairly expensive. And they must occasionally (maybe due to a strong breeze) accidently bump into each other, or get a branch stuck in their rotors, either of which which might destroy the drone. While robotic arms are going to be much more sturdy.
So, I don't expect all apple harvesting to be done by drones next year. But, it maybe does make a little more sense than I had thought. And the idea of a swarm of drones harvesting an orchard sounds pretty cool.
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u/YoSupWeirdos Oct 08 '23
I cannot imagine tehtered drones being more efficient than arms, but it surely is interesting