I would settle for a robot that can kill blackberry bushes. Blackberries cut me so much, every time I go do maintenance on another noxious weed, English ivy which is busy killing all my trees
But… blackberry bushes are the good kind of invasive!
Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
51–60 of 78 posts
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#52But can it harvest blackberries cheaper than humans?
Farms don't run on novelty, they run on margins
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#53I'll hold my breath, but this would be fantastic. We need to automate away the boring/hard jobs.
And then what for all the people who did them?
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#54One day, maybe but not yet. From the article:
>> Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
Note also that there are no photos of the robot. I think that's because it hasn't even been built yet, let alone deployed.
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#55Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product. - demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world. - no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans. - no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and re…
I am not an "AI will kill all jobs" fan at all.
Although when it comes to precedents, "robots" have (luckily) taken many jobs in agriculture already.
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#56Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product. - demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world. - no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans. - no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and re…
The quote from the researcher is that one "could [hypothetically] design something that is better than the human hand for that one specific task," which gets turned into "some day this specific device could be better" in the prose, which becomes a suggestion that hey, maybe it already is better! in the headline. Everything published by a Uni PR department is a puff piece, frankly I don't know why they're even allowed…
I agree, we should not allow PR puff pieces by universities, or by technology companies, either.
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#57Selective plant breeding and robotics pickers are the way forward here. University of Arkansas is the holder of multiple plant patents for better blackberries. New varieties are bred for many, many traits (sweetness, transport, shelf quality, ripening window, etc.)
Prof John Clark likely has invented the berries you've ate: https://news.uark.edu/articles/63163/arkansas-fruit-breeder-...
Harvest costs for fruit are an incredibly important consideration for farms and out of the thousands of potential fruits you could eat, the commercial winners have to be profitable.
There are some awesome opportunities for robotics, computer vision, and ML in agriculture. And if you can reduce harvest costs by 75% like this approach for blueberries, farmers have more market options to select better flavor qualities because the harvest quality goes up: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/impact/innovative-harvest-...
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m yet to see ivy kill a tree. I don’t get why people think this happens. It can certainly make them look ugly though.
I've seen it and then seen the resulting dead tree fall on my house. Tree was already dead from ivy by the time I bought it. When I finally went back to cut it out, the biggest ivy were like 14cm diameter or bigger.
This is what I mean. Maybe the tree was just dead? How do you know the ivy caused that?
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#59Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product. - demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world. - no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans. - no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and re…
>Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product.
There's no incentive for the capital class to massively invest in fruit picking robotics when there are tens of millions of exploitable humans on the planet that you can use do the same job for dirt cheap.
The economic balance needs to change for change to happen.
That's why the capital class is overinvesting in AI, because that can potentially replace the higher paid jobs where the labor has leverage and turn them into similarly exploitable workers.
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#60Having filled my share of blackberry flats, the first part of the picking motion is a ripeness check. You want the berry to be firm with a bit of give, and you want it to pull free from the plant easily. The force feedback sensors mentioned here seems to be for training purposes, but they would probably be better used on the finished grabbers to detect ripeness.
Yeah but are there other, sensor based approaches that would also work? Ripe berries are softer, so sonic/ultrasonic waves would propagate differently. Is there a wavelength of light which behaves differently? Can shaking the branch and observing the motion of the berry provide a clue?
im pretty sure you can determine ripeness solely from the colour of the fruit for most fruits, no?