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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]

#301

Post by robotresearcher »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #168
robotresearcher wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cri…

Yeah, instead of a swarm you could have one gigantic arm that can reach anywhere.

Gigantic arms are not feasible because of how torque and leverage work.

As your arm gets longer, it has to get stronger, thus heavier, thus requiring larger motors, and anchored to the ground better. After a handful of meters, robot arms can’t hold themselves up, let alone carry a useful tool.

There are multiple meter long robot arms for lifting big things in factories but they are enormous, enormously expensive, and consume enormous power.

But here’s a delightful concept that sidesteps this, by making the arm weigh nothing:

https://youtu.be/INTHRNcyW9w

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

#302

Post by bluGill »

illys wrote: post #296
bluGill wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vinegar is more toxic to humans than roundup. And you need a lot more of it to be effective.

Could you develop? Kind of toxicity? As traces in food? Source? I put vinegar in my salad sauce, I would not dare with glyphosate.

Check the SDS for details, you can easily goggle it, though reading them is harder. You put dilute vinegar on your salad. You don't do that for glyphosate because it doesn't add any flavor, but if you put as much on your salad as you do vinegar it would harmless.

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

#303

Post by modeless »

parineum wrote: post #192
modeless wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool, yeah, precise targeting should remove the need for highly toxic herbicide.

That seems opposite to me. Precise targeting would allow the use of highly toxic herbicides in minute quantities.

The reason herbicides have to be highly toxic is that they are sprayed indiscriminately, so only small quantities actually get on the target. Farmers don't prefer highly toxic things. They would prefer to use less toxic things, applied directly in large quantities to the target and not elsewhere.

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

#304

Post by dhx »

aerophilic wrote: post #147
modeless wrote: post #12

Seems like it should hoe each weed instead of spraying it. I guess that's a little harder to do. Maybe a lot harder. Two other things I thought were interesting in the video. One, the idea of mapping the whole field is pretty cool. There must be useful things you could do with a millimeter-scale 3D map of an entire field. Two, this is happening in California, just a few hours' drive from Silicon Valley. I hope some o…

For tilling to kill weeds, there actually is one that does that, Farmwise[0]. The challenge with Agtech robots in general is that you need to be able to prove payback, including all operations costs, in ideally 12 months or less on equipment. This is very hard for most crops because you have to be constantly moving from field to field. However, it is doable and I see it happening soon, starting in specific crops (My…

I'm glad you mentioned the economics of automating farms. There are numerous products listed in this thread that only appear to target one crop type and only perform one low cost activity (spraying, weeding, etc) that is done once per growing season (and often once per year).

Automation of day-neutral strawberry picking sounded sensible on first glance to me because harvest occurs over many months of a year (extendable by transporting the robots to another region with different growing seasons) thus robots are not sitting around idle for 95% of the year. Additionally, harvesting strawberries is dangerous work for humans to perform due to repetitive twisting, bending and reaching.

However, looking deeper into the economics of strawberries (using Australia as an example), picking costs are stated to only be 20% of fixed growing costs[1] seemingly amounting to AUD$1.30/plant (USD$0.80-1.00/plant). With a typical density of 40000 plants/hectare, robots appear to only be cost neutral if they can be operated at AUD$52000/hectare (USD$30000-40000/hectare) for picking. This results in, for example, two AUD$26000/year (USD$15000-20000/year) robots assigned per hectare needing to pick at a rate of 2 seconds per plant[2] for 12 hours each every day. With 9 million tons of strawberries produced globally per year, the strawberry harvesting market would be AUD$11bn if Australian labour rates, likely amongst the highest, were the global norm.

Would it be fair to say that farm automation will only become viable if everyone accepts the true cost of growing produce is much higher than current prices. That, for example, wages for farm workers would need to be much higher (doubled or more) to be livable wages and also to compensate for injuries and health risks of farm work and an inability to work in manual labour jobs at older age. In Australia we're seeing many news articles on the topic of "lack of farm workers" so a significant upwards movement in farm worker wages seems possible. Or perhaps strict health and safety regulations introduced to protect farm workers from repetitive injuries would result in wide adoption of farm robotics? Or perhaps it will just be cheap robotics that results in mass uptake of farm robotics?.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-06-25/breakdown-of-th...

[2] Per a 2019 example from one of your competitors (https://youtu.be/9cxHYEzMVKQ?t=106) it looks very difficult to pick at a rate of 2 seconds per plant without wastage (e.g. missing obscured berries) but my simple calculations are nonetheless optimistic.

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

#305

Post by doublerabbit »

CardenB wrote: post #186
doublerabbit wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> John Deere > pesticide sprayer Says all about the company.

The sprayer significantly reduces the amount of pesticide needed. It’s not crop dusting, it’s precision spraying.

With chemicals, killing insects, pollution creation and everything else outright environmental dangerous.

Lasers are a MUCH better option. John Deere is not a reputable company when it comes to farming.

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

#306

Post by cwkoss »

quixoticelixer- wrote: post #219
cwkoss wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a plant that mimics the shapes of other leaves - even if the leaves are made out of plastic. Pretty fascinating, the same photoreceptors suspected to enable this have been found in other plants, but the others don't use it to engage in mimicry. Weeds adapting to look like non-weeds is highly plausible, IMO. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/#:~:tex... .

> Weeds adapting to look like non-weeds is highly plausible, IMO. It's not highly plausible. It would take a lot of generations and a lot of mutations for this to happen.

Boquila trifoliolata can do it within a single generation. Most weeds don't have this capability currently, but a strong selective pressure could make it happen pretty quick with the right lucky mutations.

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

#307

Post by jillesvangurp »

madacol wrote: post #267
jillesvangurp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the current ways of doing intensive farming are hard on the land and ultimately very wasteful. If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming, what they have in common is that they leverage a more data driven approach where you simply don't need to pre-emptively correct problems if you can manage the environment in which you grow plants better. Avoiding the conditions t…

> If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?. I've heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other areas It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically if electricity becomes…

I don't know what you've heard and where you've heard it but there is generally a lot of misinformation floating around and most of it is being sponsored by lobbies with an agenda to keep the oil and gas companies going. So, I would suggest not taking any of that at face value. Including what you hear in threads like this or from me.

Vertical farms are essentially closed systems where nutrients, energy and some water goes in and produce comes out. There's a bit more to it of course but that's the general idea. They are climate controlled environments where light is provided via grow lights. In short, it uses energy which needs to come from somewhere.

You are confusing power requirements and greenhouse gases. Mostly these things use some form of sustainable power. Either sourced indirectly via some electricity provider; or directly with e.g. solar panels. If you think about it, the number one expensive consumable here is electricity and the cheapest way to produce it is via renewables. It's that simple. Why would you get more expensive energy if you can get it cheaper. Keeping all those ACs, lights, pumps, etc. going you are going to have to figure that one out or deal with competition that is smarter than you on that front.

There are probably a few farms that are forced to buy via the grid and are hopelessly dependent on their local coal burning monopolists. Not a great business plan but the good news is that coal is rapidly becoming a very unfashionable way to produce power due to the fact that it is expensive and dirty. It being expensive cuts down on energy margins and causes coal dependent producers to be dealing with awkward things like going bankrupt and being forced to pay more for their coal than they can charge for the resulting energy when wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Gas has similar issues, as people that pay gas bills these days can vouch for. Mine went up by 2x recently. Not great.

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

#308

Post by tim333 »

z9znz wrote: post #253
tim333 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can't just stick seeds in a field if you lack water or your soil is already dead from overfarming. These are issues we face already, and they are only getting worse. The water shortages are going to be our first impasse, because there's no remedy. Current farming uses vast amounts of water, much of which leaves the area due to evaporation. This leads to rapid desertification of regions, and then traditional farmi…

Well, traditional farming's gone on for thousands of years. The water goes to the sea, comes back as rain and things go on. I'm not convinced there's much of a crisis overall.

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

#309

Post by JoeAltmaier »

MikePlacid wrote: post #138
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the invisible ones will thrive immediately. So, 1 generation.

How do you know they are not thriving already?

All competition removed.

This sprayer is designed to promote the growth of {everything it doesn't kill}. Those 'weeds' will have as much benefit from the spot-spraying as the crop. Which is either significant, or it's negligible (and this sprayer is useless, so probably not that)

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

#310

Post by quixoticelixer- »

jollyllama wrote: post #297
bluGill wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Gardening the typical garden crops do - but those are high labor which is why we garden them. You could plant wheat in your garden it would be more labor, but your yields would probably be less, or if you are really good the same.

Most people would be much healthier consuming less soybeans and corn syrup and more garden vegetables.

Actually we would be better consuming more soybeans. Most of it goes to animal feed.
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