I'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?
some other skill free job
Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#72It’s a press release for a patent with a lot of “robot arm could …” and “once $THING_THAT_HASNT_HAPPENED happens…”, and the topper: “ 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. ” Keep your long sleeved shirts and overalls handy, because robots are not going to pick your blackberries f…
Most of these ideas look great on paper, are easy to implement mechanically and then look great in the news, but then take years to become practical.
nerds mate, very little real world experience. reminds me of silicon valley chads that come up with apps to solve hunger in africa
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Ask "could you pressure-wash this thing"? Is that a necessary requirement? I mean, that would probably damage current harvesters, who are human people. I mean, there are lots of parts of cars where pressure washing would probably force fluid into the bearings. Might that not apply to hydraulic, pneumatic or electronic systems too? (I do get what you're saying though)
Yes, powerwashing would be wanted. That's an IP69K, not too hard to hit with some basic mechanical protections. Unless you need delicate sensors which need direct contact to samples to work. Maybe it's not a complete necessity, but generally it's gonna be mixed in with big farm equipment that is power washed. The more you have to "coddle" the equipment the less cost effective it'll be for farmers. Farm workers genera…
> used power washers on each other
Probably, but this is unsafe - you don't want to deal with high pressure jets of water or flying debris near eyes.
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#74Excuse me but what is new here? Soft grippers have been a thing for decade now, there's evem industrial mass produced ones [1]. There's at least a dozens of labs making similar things each in Sk, Japan and China, how could they even patent this?? (maybe first ever in US?)
As for sensors, there's nothing new there either? There's even cheap open source haptics sensor nowadays [2] by meta, or just companies [3] making them. Collecting data with humans is nothing new either.
They don't even have a product, it's a "could" with the cherry on top:
>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.
Yes the part that have been the hardest (sensor fusion) haven't even been checked...
Berry picking with robot have been a thing for a while now [4]
[1] OnRobot https://youtu.be/BYAwP7Gn4N4?feature=shared
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#75Having 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?
There are two metrics - softness and ease of separation. Ideally there would be a 2nd force sensor that measures pull on the berry and then releases the grip if a max value is hit.
That being said, ripeness is best detected by measuring water and sugar content. I'd imagine a more mature version of this tech would be the standard in a decade - https://paw.princeton.edu/article/princeton-engineers-use-wi...
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> no regards for economics This is the #1 killer every time. You will always find the most efficient farm machinery to be the least human-like in its design principles. The more it looks like something out of Mad Max the better. Unless we come up with a machine like the combine harvester for blackberries, no one is going to be interested.
In most cases if you want to machine harvest you have to design your field around that. A vineyard, for example, that is designed to be machine harvested looks very different from one that is designed to be hand harvested. So if you want to machine harvest blackberries at scale you probably have to plant and manage your blackberry bushes in a specific way to allow for machine harvesting.
> "...plant and manage blackberry bushes..."
Have you ever dealt with blackberry brambles? Because "plant" and "manage" aren't the words that come to mind. "Dominate" and "contain"... maybe?
Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#77Re: Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
#78When you automate a system, you end up with at least three systems: the one doing the automated work, a control system, and a supply system to deliver and maintain it.
Automating work, contrary to most discourse around it, doesn't simplify things, doesn't make them more secure, and doesn't reduce employment.
Automating increases complexity non-linearly and makes things overall more fragile, and demand more human labor.
This can only work when population and education levels grow steadily. All these systems we build and collectively call civilization only exist and thrive because they are a reflection of the enormous complexity that self reproducing and complex-language enabled monkeys could engender by burning biomass accumulated for millions of years and using that surplus energy.
When our population numbers, and the complexity of our symbolic systems start to decline, we will bring all of these down systems with us.