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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.
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
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.
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.
It's not that ethylene is bad, it's that ripening off the vine sucks. You're stuck with the amount of flavor when picked, ethylene just softens the fruit. On the vine the fruit can keep adding flavor as it softens. Strawberries are really only good ripened on the vine and eaten within 24 hours of being picked. Anything else is a pale imitation.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.