[vwat]

Reading the comments it struck me: why is tele operated agricultural robots not a thing? A robot with wheels and an array of cameras and arms. It rolls down the line and remote workers pick the fruit. Maybe even out of country workers being paid pennies...I’m sure the latency could be overcome. You could host thousands of humans with very few robots. Better productivity, lower cost in the long run and you’re resilient against labor problems which is really good when all your labor is illegal. If nobody gives a good reason why it doesn’t exist I would be receptive to people who might want to do a start up...

Googling around I find some recent stuff. It seems to have started being on people’s minds in the past five years only. A lot of complicated articulated arms and inputs. I am only more convinced that there is arbitrage here... a very simple articulation mechanism, something akin to what hello robot did vs willow garage, would be totally new. And you don’t have to replicate perfectly the performance of humans because it’s a sliding scale, you could use the robot to downsize at first, following it with a small human team.

[jcims]

Depends on what you’re harvesting but the challenges are likely to be in the actual picking motion not dropping/bruising/cutting the food, if there is any selection happening the senses of touch and smell are largely gone, navigating the plant without damaging it, not compacting the soil around the roots more than necessary, overall speed, etc.

Bespoke harvesters for things like potatoes and almonds obviously destroy humans in the productivity department. If we’re still picking it that’s a good signal that automation will be tricky.

We probably have the technology to do most of it now, but you may wind up with a half million dollar robot.

[ZitchDog]

there are already out of country workers being paid pennies to pick fruit - why add the cost of robotics?

[tintor]

Machines get stuck in mud, trample / cut plants, pieces of plants get stuck in machine, and require frequent maintenance. The more degrees of freedom, the more failure points. Also, robots are $$$$, while unskilled human labor is $. Still, there several agro robotics startups.

[sleepysysadmin]

Few years ago I was part of the networking team to build a new greenhouse. Normally they would need hundreds of employees but this was reduced to 3. Fully automated, everything on rails.

This is how it is already. It just takes time to amortize, build, and operate facilities.

[nicrusso7]

Maybe the cost of the robot..? It wouldn’t be cheap I guess.. but yeah definitely a great application of robotics.