Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Robot Picks Only the Ripest Strawberries
kkleiner writes "The Institute of Agricultural Machinery at Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, along with SI Seiko, has developed a robot that can select and harvest strawberries based on their color. Ripened berries are detected using the robot's stereoscopic cameras, and analyzed to measure how red they appear. When the fruit is ready to come off the vine, the robot quickly locates it in 3D space and cuts it free. From observation to collection, the harvesting process takes about 9 seconds per berry. Creators estimate that it will be able to cut down harvesting time by 40%."
One step away from harvesting humans!
These robots are the real zombies, they need brains to power their neural net.
Because if they can, then we'd want the robots to pick them before they're ripe, so that they'll be ripe just as they show up on the display case in the store.
In under 3% of cases the robot shoots the strawberry with a rocket launcher.
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Get the price of such robots down enough and there'll be little incentive to pay sub-par wages to migrant field workers. (Regardless of immigration status, but illegals are more exploitable.)
Conversely it could be because we've long had a source of cheap field labor that the US agricultural machinery business hasn't made such advances in robotics. Pity, really -- many of the issues a robotic strawberry picker has to deal with are common to the activity of a whole range of other robots. Build a general purpose agricultural field worker robot and have alternate software loads (and perhaps interchangeable picker mechanisms) for blueberries, tomatoes, whatever.
(Such picker robots, with appropriate sensors, could also be adapted to tasks like minefield clearing. Although that might lead to a scenario like that in the TV adaptation of Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man".)
-- Alastair
Locomotion and selection are two distinct problems. Presumably the selection/picking components could be added to a suitable chassis designed for navigation real fields (which could support a host of other picking and crop-tending apps).
If not, then they still don't need a track for each row, just a track that can be moved from one row to another. Perhaps make the fields circular with a radial track, like some irrigation systems.
-- Alastair
Having a dozen people lying on their stomach on each side of a tractor puller 'wings' isn't cheaper.
http://www.slk.at/fileadmin/img/Fotobewerb/fw_Gurkenflieger_Norbert_Breuer_4100_Ottensheim.jpg
I suppose that if this provides enough of an advantage, then it makes sense to rework the whole field so that it lies on a perfectly flat and straight grid.
It's been done with warehouses (Kiva for instance), so why not in a field?
Truly amazing technology! But... The idea that this sort of thing will free people to lead more leisure lives is nonsense. What technology like this does is eliminate jobs for humans, who will than have to find other jobs, and eventually, in the end, result in huge unemployment, and a more defined caste system of super rich and dirt poor.
Seriously.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The video seems to show this moving on smooth straight metal tracks. I wonder how adapting it to travel on uneven dirt paths will affect it's ability to cut the intended strawberry? Either that or they run track up each row in their one square kilometer field.
A lot of premium strawberry production is done hydroponically in greenhouses, especially in Japan. An almost ideal, controlled environment for robotic gardening.
If the selection/picking algorithms are designed with the assumption that the robot will be perfectly upright and square to the ground, it's going to get really confused when one wheel of the cart is sitting on a rock. Using sensors to provide data to instruct actuators is all well and good, but it needs to be calibrated to support real-world data. Moving around the field, on dirt, will provide rather different data than metal tracks. I don't think the two problems are necessarily distinct.
While "Goodbye Mexicans" is a bit flamey, automating the jobs locals will never willingly do has always been a logical goal.
When we reduce manual labor, remove some jobs that draw poor people to the US, increase profits and make our farms more competitive we win.
We don't scrap massive combine harvesters in favor of horse-drawn equipment because they enormously increase productivity. Harvesting is dull, dirty, and sometime dangerous, ideal for robots.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And yet the design and manufacturing of these robots will take place in Japan so we won't see many local jobs from this except for some repair jobs.
That's exactly the problem here - capitalism won't work when we automatize most of the jobs. We are seeing the transition into that right here, right now. The only question remaining is if the current system can fail and transform gracefully, or if it will end up in violence. I am not optimistic.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
They said the same thing when the first steam engine powered the first factory. Human greed will never go away, and that is the engine of capitalism, not money, not labor. We will find other unmet wants to work on.
SSC
From observation to collection, the harvesting process takes about 9 seconds per berry. That's too slow.
This isn't the first strawberry-picking robot. Here's one from five years ago. But compare this with a commercial strawberry harvester that's just digging up the beds. (Note, incidentally, that the tractor is driverless. That's standard precision farming technology today; several GPS manufacturers make the gear for that.)
Automated fruit sorting using computer vision is a routine process, and it's really fast. Small-fruit sorting machines are strange to watch. Cameras watch the fruit go by, and air jets push it around. This is all happening in bulk, much faster than humans can even watch, as big conveyors pump a stream of mixed product through the machine and streams of sorted product come out.
Robotic tomato pickers have been built by several groups, but so far the machines are too slow and the cost is too high.
In practice, the way agricultural sorting works is that the good stuff is sold is fresh fruit, the not-so-good stuff goes off to make jellies, tomato paste, and such, and the rejected stuff becomes animal feed or fertilizer.
Yeah and don't forget the advertising agencies who advertise and the lawyers who sue and the government inspectors to inspect and the ....
Dude, the only person producing new wealth in your scenario is the the farmer and look at all the overhead you're expecting him to bear.
Capitalism doesn't work when we live off credit. When we mainly extend credit to those speculating on the prices of existing assets.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Related to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-sector_hypothesis
People went from 90% agriculture workers to about 2% agriculutre workers over the past two hundred years in the USA. Of the current agriculutral production, 75% of the effort goes to meat production which is not strictly needed and in general is harming people's health, and otherwise people eat too much of the wrong foods and are obese (see Dr. Fuhrman). Why is agriculture still not using 90% of the labor force? Automation and limited demand.
Compulsory schools were created to keep kids off the street and train them to be soldiers and factory workers. Working hours went down from 12 hours 6 days a week to 8 hours five days a week, and only for adults. Child labor was outlawed. So, much of the working force was freed.
In 1950, about 30% of the workforce was in manufacturing. Now it is more like aroung 12%, and the same amount of stuff is still produced (plus some is imported from China). Why? Increasing automation, better design, and limited demand. Many people are drowning in junk that clutters their homes and lives.
Granted, in the USA, women have gone into the work force and there are other confounding factors.
What happens when services go the same way through robotics and other automation, better design, voluntary social networks, and limited demand?
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery/
Consider also that unlike food and some basic goods, most services are optional.
It turns out even most medical care is probably harmful and unneccesary, compared to just eating better and getting adequate vitamin D.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
The entire economy is poised to implode.
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
http://idlenest.freehostia.com/mirror/www.whywork.org/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=channel
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I think it will be good overall (barring things like irony killing us all)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
since it it a return to hunter/gatherer ideology with high techology, where hunter/gathers spent much of their time just rasining kids, socializing, and doing hobbies or contemplating nature and the infinite.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
The robots are like the botanical plants that people used to pick the fruits from.
It is a form of natural capitalism in the sense that the planet and its infrastructure is essentially owned by all the people, who then get dividends as citizen capitalists. :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#A_history_lesson_pre-scarcity_times_Eden_then_scarcity_times_Dickens_then_post-scarcity_times_real_soon_now
You can have a basic income as suggested in Manna to schedule and distribute what the robots make through a sort of market demand force.
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Or, if things get so abundant, like if 3D printing gets really good, you get perhaps Star Trek where people have moved beyond money, and you get mostly a gift economy and various sorts of ad-hoc planning and organizing like, say, Debian GNU/Linux.
"Study Reports On Debian Governance, Social Organization"
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/14/1349202
Typical hunter/gatherers had a gift economy and essentially collective land "ownership".
"Gift Economy: Refuting the Market Logic"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy4hFVcl6Vo
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It's a painful thing for an overly Nationalistic American to do, but if you look at the history of the Pajaro valley you would see that prior to WWII the Japanese businesses funded the Berry Farming that created such a huge demand for Strawberries. My family's ranch was funded primarily by Japanese investors before FDR stole their property and imprisoned their families.
I just hope you're not involved with writing any software that I use.
Do you have a problem reaching for and grasping something when you're laying down vs standing up? The bot isn't depending on gravity for anything, it's movements are relative to the camera. Only an idiot would give the arm and the camera separate coordinate systems, and only a bigger idiot would do that and not take the coordinate transforms into account. Although I suppose there are a lot of those around, given the state of software these days.
-- Alastair