Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video] • Hacker News Board

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#101

Post by Ancalagon » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 12:30 AM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #97

crazygringo wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

I did not assume the smaller drones would be simpler than the tractor. In fact I'd expect them to be similarly if not more complex.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#102

Post by throwawaylinux » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 12:35 AM UTC

bamboozled wrote: post #5

Weeds are the enemy /s But really, the whole idea of having perfectly manicured fields like that with no sign of any weeds around seems like the real problem to me. Zero biodiversity…we wonder where the insects are going ?

No sarcasm, it's true. Most insects are the enemy too.

The philosophy behind modern industrial farming is to basically create a chemical holocaust that extinguishes all plant, animal, and fungal life except the crop.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#103

Post by _aavaa_ » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 12:37 AM UTC

conviencefee999 wrote: post #99

_aavaa_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think there's any irony in it. That's exactly why they were used in the show.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#104

Post by robotresearcher » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 12:40 AM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #60

This 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…

> the future is swarms of small robots

A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply.

This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm critters rely on the emergent effects of lots of behavior to make up for their limited sensing and computation. By 'limited' I mean relative to a mammal or bird. Lots of behavior means lots of energy spent moving and doing: exactly what is prohibitively expensive for a robot.

Computation and sensing is getting better, smaller and cheaper much faster than batteries and actuators. This trend favors smarter robots that think carefully (cheap) and do the right thing (expensive per shot).

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#105

Post by inetknght » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 12:42 AM UTC

zurtri wrote: post #31

I am waiting for this kind of tech to become viable for smaller 'hobby' type farms. you know, under 100 acres. To get the spraying done by firing up a few drones would be excellent. Particularly with weeds that are in hard to reach places on the farm.

> I am waiting for this kind of tech to become viable for smaller 'hobby' type farms. you know, under 100 acres.

Yup. I've got four acres of grass that I'd love to farm... without having the farm be a full time job.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#106

Post by karaokeyoga » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:00 AM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #60

This 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…

Reading the comments in this thread reminded me of "Silent Running" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running). Droids (albeit 70s-style), agro-tech, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It's dated but enjoyable.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#107

Post by jldugger » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:02 AM UTC

Designing things like this was part of my embedded engineering project coursework 20 years ago. Obviously we didnt have CV and had to rely on heueristics like 'weeds have a different spectogram in near IR' but the idea has been a long time coming.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#108

Post by _c3ag » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:04 AM UTC

ForrestN wrote: post #100

elihu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 there is the problem of having too much variety on crops and people wanting meat, basically…

farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far away… because some already give reports of what went wrong to the central

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#109

Post by bjt2n3904 » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:18 AM UTC

Taking the ideas of big tech, and applying them to a low tech area is sure to make things better. /s

The tool used to be a pipe and wheels. Now the tool is a five figure contraption with millions of lines of code, hundreds of moving parts, and extremely specific high tech things that aren't easy to replace.

People are drunk on high tech, and have forgotten that simple is good.

Re: Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]

#110

Post by TeMPOraL » Thu, Nov 17, 2022, 1:27 AM UTC

joshspankit wrote: post #96

worldsayshi wrote: post #76

Earlier 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.

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…

> But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following.

I hope you don't mean "Boids" and the three-four simple rules, because that's just an approximation of a swarm behavior made for artistic purposes - i.e. the result is supposed to pass as a flock of birds or a school of fish to casual onlookers (e.g. gamers, audience of a movie), and not to be accurate to the real thing.