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Fruit-sorting robot ‘will disrupt the industry’

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

#101

Post by scientist »

Animats wrote: post #51

Fruit sorting systems have been in production use for years. They're very impressive. Vision systems, AI, robotics, and the ability to handle huge quantities of produce. Here's a production scale apple sorting and packing system.[1] The part of the video for "big plant" shows the most automated version. Here's a system for sorting peas.[2] Each individual pea is inspected using computer vision. Each individual pea. A…

The machines showed in these videos seem suited for very large and expensive processing facilities, which probably are cost-effective because one supplies the consumption of millions to tens of millions of people. But how smaller producers can automatize their processing without owning or depending on these facilities? Would robots that cost of the order of tens of thousands euros / dollars, that automate more flexibly but slowly than the machines in the videos, be cost-effective for smaller producers? How big is the market for such robots?

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

#102

Post by drdeca »

compostor42 wrote: post #99
robotresearcher wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said "white". They said "immigrant". Incoming people of all colours are less likely to be pro-NRA than the average multi-generation American. I can't prove this, but I bet it's true.

And the vast majority of immigrants are non-white.

So if the immigrants were required to have proportions roughly the same as current population proportions you wouldn't have a problem with increasing population for the purpose of changing political opinion?

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

#103

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

scientist wrote: post #73
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to develop food sorters. Color sorting is very simple in principle and much harder in practice. The main difficulties are good lighting, not shaking your cameras and optics to pieces and keeping the optics and lights clean. For fruit sorting in particular there is the very difficult task of conveying the fruit without damaging it. The best sorter in the world won't help you if it mangles the fruit. In my old l…

How big is this market?

TBH, I suck at the business sides of things so I'm not the best guy to ask, but my impression is that the market isn't s great as one might think considering how much for we all eat. There ought to be a lot of room for growth if the machines actually move out to the field. Most of them are sitting inside cleaning plants because they are delicate and expensive. Search for Buhler, Sortex, Allen, Satake, Selgron for some example companies in that space.

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

#104

Post by scrollaway »

compostor42 wrote: post #69
scrollaway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Automation like this is why I call BS on the "we need more immigrants to keep the economy going!" folks. This is a bit of a shortcut (and most don't realize it) to "more people doesn't necessarily mean less jobs to go around, as available work is not a finite product because of the amount of artificial demand an increased population can create". We don't need more human drones; when properly funneled, increased imm…

> We don't need more human drones; when properly funneled, increased immigration can mean a better economy. Agreed. Importing millions of unskilled laborers is insane as automation picks up. Those jobs will be made redundant in short order. (They probably already would have been, but a massive pool of cheap labor meant little incentive for automation. Similar to the first steam-engines being unused by the ancient Gre…

Or bringing in more, and training people better. But this applies to the entire population through a better education system of course...

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

#105

Post by drdeca »

compostor42 wrote: post #52
oldmanjay wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The calls for restricted immigration are certainly politically motivated (mainly variations on "I don't want them getting mine") so what's the difference? National borders mean less and less all the time. Clinging to them to weather this upcoming economic storm is like using an anchor as a liferaft.

So why not let the entire population of Africa move to the United States? Borders are an antiquated concept according to you.

Why not let the entire population of California move to Rhode island?

Wait, who is preventing the entire population of California from moving to Rhode island?

I'm not aware of any regulations that forbid anyone from moving to Rhode island from California, except for things like house arrest or other things requiring someone to stay in one place.

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

#106

Post by sinxoveretothex »

hugh4 wrote: post #33
wolfram74 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And remind me why I, as a farmer (hypothetically) who spent millions of dollars buying a piece if land and millions more to buy robots to work on it, then spends all his time worrying about maintenance and shipping and prices and pruning and planting and weeds and so forth... remind me why I should consent to having my profits confiscated and given to other organisms for no reason other than that they happen to be of…

There's a finite population that a single planet can hold, so there will have to be some form of population control eventually.

Now, why the heck would you (the farmer entrepreneur) care about what the government does with the taxes it generates from your revenues? The question is: is your investment profitable enough? Everything else about your scenario is politics and, in a democracy, these things are decided (or supposed to if you drink from the cynic's cup) by the population.

If the farmer (as a person) disagrees, he can just not buy or buy in another country or planet or whatever. A post-scarcity society has value enough for some of us that we'd run such an automated farm for little profit if only to selfishly sustain said society.

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

#107

Post by [deleted] »

mason240 wrote: post #66
BuckRogers wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. The border has always been open for people to pass freely for centuries. Restricting border crossings would be a change in immigration policy. I don't think it's necessary.

And then we decided that having government, taxes, social programs, ect were necessary. You are free to feel otherwise, but the issue of society vs anarchy has been firmly resolved.

[deleted]

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

#108

Post by birbal »

I have some personal experience with applying computer/machine vision techniques to assessing rice quality. In India, rice quality assessment is a high value activity as the difference in per unit weight price is dramatic across different varieties of rice. The longer the grain, as an example, the pricier it is. Discoloration is also an indicator of bad quality rice. Since there is such a huge difference in price, there is naturally cheating, subjectivity and sampling driven errors. We had developed a device that would objectively and quickly measure the rice quality based on a multitude of factors. This was not just software because there had to be way to cancel out any variance due to ambient conditions and it had to be a device that was easy to maintain in a highly rugged rice factory environment. We did really well but where we failed was our inability to break through the powerful rice quality inspectors cartel and even the rice suppliers who were worried about being "found out". Manual inspection was strangely seen as way of having some control over the proceedings.

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

#109

Post by 13thLetter »

drdeca wrote: post #97
compostor42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is being white so important? What's the difference? Replace "white" with "jewish" and you'd fit right in with holocaust deniers/apologist. So just to be clear, you have no problem with ethnically cleansing a nation to change its political disposition?

I'm a bit confused about why you (seem to) think that is a good analogy? One wrinkle that might be part of your idea is that instead of comparing the act of promoting immigration to the act of genocide, you are instead comparing the defense of promoting immigration to a denial or approval of genocide. Perhaps this is what the analogy is based on? However, I expect that you are aware that many people distinguish betwe…

Let's put aside the admittedly inflammatory rhetoric. Are you arguing that if the government decided to peacefully change the population's demographics in order to make a currently unpopular political goal more achievable in the future, that would be okay?

Because that's about the most anti-democratic thing imaginable. In a democratic society it is absolutely, unconditionally wrong for the government to do such a thing. The government serves at the pleasure of the people, not the other way around!

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

#110

Post by compostor42 »

taco_emoji wrote: post #88
compostor42 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't answer the question: You think it is okay to purposefully and systematically replace one ethnic group with another to achieve your political ends? Your desire meets the UN's definition of genocide, congrats: (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Who's "deliberately inflicting" anything? Which "conditions of life" are being so inflicted which are disproportionately deleterious to white populations vs. other populations? Do you understand that the term "physical destruction" means something rather more extensive than a gradual, unguided change in demographics?

There will be hardly any countries with a white majority left by 2050. Countless instances of the media, activists and politicians telling us how less white people is a good thing. Being white is the new "original sin" in the secular liberal mind.

Calling the demographic change "unguided" is laughable.

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