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Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

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Re: Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

#4
post #2

I'm wondering what is so difficult about this task. I mean, all the "good" fruit looks almost the same, so recognizing it should be simple. Also, there's plenty of training material.

Fruit is not a uniform shape and it typically bruises easily so it can be difficult to design a robotic "hand" to consistently pick up fruit of irregular shape without bruising.

This article from Gizmodo does a good job of explaining the difficulties involved: http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/10/why-is-it-so-hard-for-robo...

Re: Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

#5
post #3

I toured a commercial apple orchard 10 years ago. They use massive parallel conveyor system with laser-imaging for quality and gates to sort. I'd be surprised if this robotic arm+vision system could compete on cost and through-put.

Note this "can distinguish and selectively pick fruit." Right now you either set up nets, have a machine bulk shake a tree and take what falls, or pay someone to pick ripe fruit. The conveyor system would then sort the collected fruit.

This system either replaces human collectors or significantly increases yields compared to shaking the trees. But, you would likely still need the bulk sorting at a later stage.

Re: Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

#7
post #6

I think this would free migrant farm labor from having the burden of income, freeing them to be wondering poets. Reminds me a recycling sorting robot, which in my country is done by the mentally disabled. Just the kind of person you want to take a job away from.

I agree. Innovation and technological advances cause more harm than good. Break the threshing machines! Break them all!!

Re: Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

#8
post #6

I think this would free migrant farm labor from having the burden of income, freeing them to be wondering poets. Reminds me a recycling sorting robot, which in my country is done by the mentally disabled. Just the kind of person you want to take a job away from.

Jobs are pretty shitty, they get in the way doing any real work. If we can have a functional society where robots deal with all the manual labor, the owners of the robots get half the profits and the other half get spread uniformly amongst the populace, anybody who wants to work on things that demonstrably unprofitable like writing linux kernel, or teaching their children to read, or advanced math or analyzing adventure time for asinine thematic story telling, well, who knows what we might get done.

Re: Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

#9
post #6

I think this would free migrant farm labor from having the burden of income, freeing them to be wondering poets. Reminds me a recycling sorting robot, which in my country is done by the mentally disabled. Just the kind of person you want to take a job away from.

Jobs are pretty shitty, they get in the way doing any real work. If we can have a functional society where robots deal with all the manual labor, the owners of the robots get half the profits and the other half get spread uniformly amongst the populace, anybody who wants to work on things that demonstrably unprofitable like writing linux kernel, or teaching their children to read, or advanced math or analyzing advent…

Unfortunately, that's not what is going to happen. The owners will just take all of the profits, maybe even get themselves a subsidy passed to promote the use of robots under some "green energy initiative" or something.

Re: Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

#10
post #6

I think this would free migrant farm labor from having the burden of income, freeing them to be wondering poets. Reminds me a recycling sorting robot, which in my country is done by the mentally disabled. Just the kind of person you want to take a job away from.

Well, if your view on work is that we shouldn't make processes more efficient if it means taking jobs away, how about this: automate work and then pay people to dig a hole and fill it, paying them with the profits from the automation.

Now, maybe you think it'd be quite useless, so you might suggest cutting away the crap and just paying people to do nothing. Congrats, you are now a proponent of basic income!

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