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MIT and the Constant Robotic Gardeners
Singularity Hub writes "MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is pioneering the field of automated farming. During a semester-long experiment, CSAIL's researchers created a laboratory farm: tomato plants in terra cotta pots with artificial turf for grass. The goal of the experiment: to see if these tomatoes could be grown, tended, and harvested by robot caretakers."
Mit romney!!! yes!!!
The caption under the image reads, "CSAIL's precision agriculture robots give us a peek into the future where organic life may be tended by artificial life."
I wonder if they meant the plants . . . or us.
-Peter
You know, most people who go to the garden supply store and claim to be growing "tomatoes" are actually growing a completely different kind of consumable. Could this lead to fully automated pot farms?
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Having robots raising our food is probably a great idea, since it presents less oppurtunity for contamination. Contaminations is a big problem now, there is always some food recall because of bacteria in food or something similar. Not all of these are directly caused by humans, but I would say that a good part of them are. Having robots to do part of the work presents less oppurtunity for contamination.
This is dangerous - just think, soon we'll have farms dedicated to growing hamsters to use for power, but... how long until *humans* become hamster substitutes?
was hoping to see a solar powered swarm of microbots that seek out and destroy aphids rather than the pointless application of an off the shelf robot pointlessly squirting water on potted plants.
This isnt revolutionary. its pathetic.
This might work in the lab, but when robots are working alongside seasonal farm laborers, those poor robots are going to break down real fast, get run over by heavy farm machinery, and just plain disappear under mysterious circumstances.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
is on a space ship orbiting Saturn.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They already tried something like this and it didn't work out. Everything blew up.
is by placing giant scissor blades on the robots, and using a liberal recognition algorithm for when tomatoes are big enough to be cut from the stem
please
Might be slightly off-topic, but cannot help pointing out. With general elections in India round the corner, Mulayam Singh Yadav, the leader of a prominent political party calls for elimination of Computers and English. http://elections.ndtv.com/news_story.aspx?ID=NEWEN20090090458&: "The use of computers in offices is creating unemployment problems. Our party feels that if work can be done by a person using hands there is no need to deploy machines." And we are supposed to compete economically along with US, EU and China.
"pioneering the field of automated farming"
My father did this in the '60s and '70s. Not using robots, just my older brother.....
Not to be alarmist, especially since this technology is very far down the road from being widely used, but what happens if this begins to replace manual labor jobs as has been predicted for decades? I'm sure Asimov has a leg up on me but here goes:
Without education infrastructure in place to train current generations, low cost robots will compete with unskilled laborers for work. While this could be 30-50 years down the road, what happens when the poor huddled masses can no longer do manual jobs? Will their quality of living be raised up since it will be cheap to produce things, or will those who own the means of production horde it for themselves and leave everyone who can't afford their price to starve?
Also, this would certainly make energy needs (and potentially metals/commodities) even more accute. If the robots can't function, then no one (or many fewer people) can eat.
I'm all for automation, but if we don't back up our technology with the understanding that we need to provide other opportunities to people, then we may be doing humanity a disservice. From a very cold point of view, though, perhaps we would just be thinning out the population, which already seems to be far larger than necessary (i don't really advocate this point of view, but I know there are those out there who do).
I'm sure this has all come up before (ie not terribly insightful), just throwing it out there for discussion.
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Could this be Soil-ent Green Tomatoes?
I for one welcome our vegetable tending overloads.
These messenger boys (don't know about typists) were probably there because they come from a poor family and didn't have the means of proper education. However, they could learn much on the job by interacting with and observing the professionals. Some of the brightest who are willing to learn on their own could actually gain a successful career one day because of the experience they gathered doing these low-skill service positions. I'm sure you can find many autobiographies of successful people who began their lives similarly.
Nowadays they are replaced by automation. That means the poor and uneducated lose a valuable opportunity to become successful. Their only chance now is to go through a proper education, and our education system still favors in many ways families living comfortable lives.
I once had a signature.
For those of you old enough to remember Huey and Duey the robots in the movie Silent Running: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/
-- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
Kudos for MIT for working on this problem.
But "pioneering" it? Give me a break. Agricultural robotics ("agrobots") has been a going field for decades. The devices are very capable and some are quite inexpensive - to the point that there is at least one organic farm I know about that doesn't use or need the price breaks from exploiting foreign and/or illegal workers to run at a solid profit, despite pressure from the local authorities to hire illegals.
Look at The Mitchell Farm just for starters. (NOT the one I characterized above, by the way.) There are others using various levels of automation in Oregon, California, etc. And those are just places I KNOW about.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My robot gardener has been working for thousands of years!
http://pireze.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/pirezejapan-08-trip-part-q-0009.jpg
WTS: 100 tomatoes, 10 isk per, best price in Jita!
Got podded on lvl 1 mission, can someone spare 2 rutabagas?
Convo me for best prices on tomatoes, potatoes and cucumbers.
Do you like to farm? SpaceGoats is recruiting all farming players over 2M SP. Join channel SpaceGoat or convo NannyGoat for more info.
QUITTING EVE! SELLING GOLDEN CORN STATUE! ONLY ONE IN NEW EDEN! 1M ISK! CONVO ME!
One of the 187.
All of the parts appear to be readily available off-the-shelf parts.
The base is an iRobot Create.
The arm appears to be a modified Lynxmotion AL5C.
Plus a generic laptop, webcam, etc.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
This would be really cool if the robots were able to handle the kind of tomatoes that used to be grown before the demands of machinery required breeding thick-skinned varieties.
But won't this cause tax revenue from illegal immigrants to plummet & home equity to fall because of the lack of illegal immigrants to buy houses? It's going to be banned.
The latest IEEE Spectrum "Winners and Losers" edition listed a robotic strawberry picker as a loser. The gist was that it doesn't work in fields, only special greenhouses, and that the mechanics of actually picking a strawberry without damaging it is fairly complicated. This tomatobot doesn't seem to address either of these issues, either.
"Runaway"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/
Anyone remember the scene where the robot in the field picks a bug off of a plant, drops it onto rollers and squishes it?