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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%."
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
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
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.
Really? I have lots of free time, work far shorter hours, have a much higher standard of living than my parents did at my age and a vastly higher standard of living than any of my grandparents did at my age. I'm definitely not super rich (well, except in the sense that anyone living in an industrialised western nation is in the top 10% of the world's wealth), but I certainly would not be able to enjoy my current lifestyle if it were not for the fact that automation has brought down the cost of living comfortably. If wheat still needed to be harvested by men with scythes and clothes still needed to be hand sewn from cloth made by someone with a hand loom that took a week to weave a single piece (from hand-spun wool), then I would be barely able to afford food, let alone clothes.
I live in a society where bread is so cheap that I can afford to eat a few slices from a loaf and then throw the rest of it away! And this isn't even a prerogative of the middle classes, even the 'poor' people can generally afford to do it. I can walk into a hospital or a GP's surgery and be prescribed drugs that will cure diseases that would have killed the richest man in the world a hundred years ago. This is almost entirely due to automation.
Yes, some jobs have gone away, but somehow I don't really find the fact that I never had the opportunity as a child to work in a coal mine particularly upsetting. I am very happy, in contrast, with the fact that I can be paid to write books and articles by a publisher in the USA and by companies all over the world to write code. This would have been completely impossible even thirty years ago and difficult ten or so years ago.
Seriously.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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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.