Title should be "Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals". That additional word gives a lot more context.
Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
91–100 of 326 posts
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#92That’s a really cool and innovative way to fix the world without using pesticides, use lil robots.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#93This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…
Next up, swarms of robot bees to do the pollination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also I think maintenance of 1000 tiny drones is going to be a lot more difficult than that of one big tractor
This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice an…
I think the worry is that with 1,000 drones, if you have 10 breaking daily, that's probably a full-time job for someone to be repairing them, especially if they have to go out retrieving them.
One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also I think maintenance of 1000 tiny drones is going to be a lot more difficult than that of one big tractor
This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice an…
On large scales, it's more like you have a hundred big tractors and if one of them breaks down the whole operation keeps going because there are 99 big tractors left. The question then becomes: how much maintenance do you have to do per ton of food produced? A swarm of small robots have a lot more parts than a large tractor that does the same amount of work.
There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is being done.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#96This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…
I feel like what you're describing is still in the realm of sci fi because of limitations in robot autonomy that we have expected to break through many times without success. If we succeed with autonomous driving we will probably succeed in these domains as well. As well as many other domains.
Did you know that natural swarm dynamics completely baffled us up until a few years ago: How do birds communicate well enough to stay on a group? How do they know which direcion to go? How does it look like a singular consciousness is undulating through hundreds or thousands of individuals? We marvelled and were dumbfounded.
But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following.
Honestly, I think robot swarms will be simpler than large singles.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice an…
I think the worry is that with 1,000 drones, if you have 10 breaking daily, that's probably a full-time job for someone to be repairing them, especially if they have to go out retrieving them. One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
I guess I don't really understand your assumptions. Why would 1 massive machine capable of doing all the various tasks of managing this farm require less maintenance than 1000 presumably much simpler, smaller machines? Assuming other things besides mobility break, I don't think retrieval would be much more of an issue, or that we'd have reason to expect the failure rate to be higher for each smaller, simpler drone than for the giant, super-complex one. To get the same work done, the behemoth would have to move much faster, have many more specialize tools and sensors all in the same rig, and would not be swappable for regular maintenance without pausing the entire workflow. Small drones could go back to base in shifts (again with some margin of extra drones) so that there are always 1000 actively working.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like what you're describing is still in the realm of sci fi because of limitations in robot autonomy that we have expected to break through many times without success. If we succeed with autonomous driving we will probably succeed in these domains as well. As well as many other domains.
> If we succeed with autonomous driving .... 'We' have already succeeded in autonomous driving in agricultural and mining domains - these are much simpler, more tightly controlled and less liability prone than open highways and suburban backstreets. eg: > We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a…
Ehhh really haven't. While you could argue farming is different due to it being more constricted, it really isn't and well unlike driving, this has a size constraint which has and likely will not be solved for in the near or distant future. It's complicated and might not be solvable. And well the current advancements while they seem nice aren't very useful. I know individuals who work in this sphere specifically and there are several problems alone with basic things such as sensors which are not adequate enough, if anyone attempts to solve this problem in the next decade I'd believe them to be the next theranos.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#99This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors: > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying th…
Next up, swarms of robot bees to do the pollination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
Ironically this is actually one of the bigger problems to solve for in the generation and is one that has not been solved for.
Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice an…
On large scales, it's more like you have a hundred big tractors and if one of them breaks down the whole operation keeps going because there are 99 big tractors left. The question then becomes: how much maintenance do you have to do per ton of food produced? A swarm of small robots have a lot more parts than a large tractor that does the same amount of work. There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm u…
I guess it's true that the originally propose 1000 is an arbitrary number, and it would take some experimentation and work to figure out the ideal number of robots per acre to optimize whatever you care about most (yield, power consumption, maintenance costs being obvious contenders). But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of some size.