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

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

#231

Post by bsaul »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #230
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…

If only there were swarms of self replicating autonomous systems that can heal, recharge and defend themselves without input and adapt to new situations, while being stress tested for free for millions of years. But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.

A Sci-Fi fan biology researcher friend of mine joked a long time ago that the culmination of cybertech is biotech.

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

#232

Post by klabb3 »

z9znz wrote: post #218

Technically this is very cool. But it is ultimately trying to improve a horse and buggy rather than developing a spacecraft. The future will be something like, or at least based on, vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems) automated farms. The best hope we have for solving food needs AND climate problems is to let as much earth as possible go wild, and reduce and optimize our footprint. Actually tha…

> But it is ultimately trying to improve a horse and buggy rather than developing a spacecraft.

First, you're underselling it. 95% less pesticides is huge. If that's economically viable we're a LOT better off. I have my doubts since it's clearly a PR video, but still.

Secondly, the analogy falls short. The goal of horses and cars is transportation of goods and people, which is easy to measure and cost. Agriculture is about utilizing immensely complicated biological systems to deliver nutrition to people. We don't know everything about nutrition, let alone everything that contributes to making nutritious food. That's why we always look for minimal modifications to biological systems in order to tweak it to our liking. The same is true for say medicine; we don't design an artificial organ if we can avoid it, we usually aim for something like a simple chemical compound that triggers an existing response that helps the organ function normally, as defined by our existing biology. We may be quite advanced species, but biology is not exactly something we master.

> vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems)

Well, sounds more convenient for humans, that's true. But if you take nutrition out of the system you have to replace it with something, which I don't think we've figured out.

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

#233

Post by lm28469 »

bluSCALE4 wrote: post #198
bitL wrote: post #197

On one hand, this will maximize crop per area. On the other hand, it will kill off all insects that require diverse sets of plants, causing issues in the food chain above. The long-term consequences are unknown, likely not good.

I'd think you'd be able to identify good and bad bugs. If you mean killing off bad bugs will have unknown consequences, then yeah, probably.

It's not the chemicals that kill bugs afaik, just the fact that what was once a very diverse eco system became XX sqkm of the same plant growing on basically dead soil

This robot would not change that problem

What we'd need is sustainable farming with crop rotation and lots of diversity, but this is less efficient and farmers are already not making a ton of profit

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

#234

Post by tim333 »

z9znz wrote: post #218

Technically this is very cool. But it is ultimately trying to improve a horse and buggy rather than developing a spacecraft. The future will be something like, or at least based on, vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems) automated farms. The best hope we have for solving food needs AND climate problems is to let as much earth as possible go wild, and reduce and optimize our footprint. Actually tha…

I'm not convinced vertical systems will every be very economic. It's much cheaper to just stick some seeds in a field than build some high tech building. Re letting the earth go wild, replacing regular meat with artificial would go a long way - a lot of the land is used to feed animals we eat.

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

#235

Post by machiaweliczny »

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…

I think future is bioengineering new organisms/robots that balance ecosystem. So simply modified biological organisms that can’t reproduce

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

#236

Post by ben_w »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #230
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…

If only there were swarms of self replicating autonomous systems that can heal, recharge and defend themselves without input and adapt to new situations, while being stress tested for free for millions of years. But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.

Snark aside, as useful as the birds and the bees are, they've got their own goals, and those goals aren't always aligned with ours — hence the use of pesticides and insecticides, or indeed scarecrows, in the first place.

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

#237

Post by ben_w »

ajuc wrote: post #200
ForrestN wrote: post #86

Earlier 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…

Imagine the difference between manually replacing 1 bearing or charging 1 battery and 1000. The only reason you think it's easy is because you ignore the number and just imagine doing it once anyway.

I'd rather replace 10,000 AAA batteries than a single battery that's as big as 10,000 AAA batteries.

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

#238

Post by thunfischtoast »

battery_glasses wrote: post #70

When I see stuff like this sometimes I get depressed that I'm building apps that just move little bits of information around the web and don't have any real demonstrable value to the world. How hard is the jump into the realm of computer vision/AI/robotics for someone with strong skills and experience building web applications? Is the coding much different? Is a company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to…

It's very much possible, the range of skills needed to deploy actual ML-driven applications ranges from web developers, data engineers, ML engineers, Ops guys to data scientists, so pick what you like.

Then again: Speaking from experience, most uses cases for ML are not fancy, world-saving new approaches like the one in the video but revolve around quite mundane applications and tasks like "how to make users click on this add", "how much will we sell next month", "can we automate the creation of thix Excel-file" etc., so pick your company carefully

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

#239

Post by thebruce87m »

battery_glasses wrote: post #70

When I see stuff like this sometimes I get depressed that I'm building apps that just move little bits of information around the web and don't have any real demonstrable value to the world. How hard is the jump into the realm of computer vision/AI/robotics for someone with strong skills and experience building web applications? Is the coding much different? Is a company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to…

I work in the embedded field, and have literally done the same application as the video.

We have a mixed team, including mechanical engineers, web developers, electronics guys, embedded software guys.

We do have ML people for custom networks but most of it is object detection/ classification which is a solved path and just needs data management.

We’ve done lots of cool ML applications, but many of them need management systems too so that’s where web apps come in.

You could definitely fill a position in a small company like mine and upskill / sideskill in time.

We’re based in Scotland but do have remote workers in other countries.

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