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Startup Testing Mobile Farmbots
An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports on Harvest Automation, a Massachusetts company developing small robots that can perform basic agricultural labor. The ones currently being tested in greenhouses and plant nurseries are 'knee-high, wheeled machines.' 'Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what's around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Key to making the robots flexible and cost-effective is designing them to work only with information provided by their sensors. They don't construct a global map of their environment, and they don't use GPS. The robots have sensors that detect boundary markers, a laser range finder to detect objects in front of them, and a gyroscope for navigating by dead reckoning. The robots determine how far they've traveled by keeping track of wheel rotations.'"
...a whole lot of U.S. immigration problems.
of Silent Running come to mind
If you need a bit better pattern recognition or control there's thousands of people willing to do farming from their PCs for free.
than paying a mexican 2 bucks a day.
The efficiency of farming (yield value per area+inputs) is going to have to grow a lot as global population increases and gets richer. This is obviously one step in that direction. Sure, this robot is laughably primitive compared to Google's self-driving car, but future generations will do better. I think that in 20 years, we'll be able to intersperse multiple simultaneous crops in the same field, which is good for the soil, reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticide, and generates a more value.
The most important reason why we don't see this sort of farming on a large scale is because it requires much more fine-motor work and is incompatible with the machines we use today. But once those machines get substantially cheaper and more dexterous than people, I think we'll make this transition. Our food will be better for it, and there will be more of it. I don't think that this is very far off in the future.
And visions of Tom Selleck shooting our garden tending overlords appear in my mind....
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
... vast social changes will ensue.
From my hazy recollection of American history, the cotton (en)gin(e), made it possible to process cotton with a lot less labor making slaves less necessary(?) and set the stage for the civil war. Or something like that.
So if these machines (or their descendants) fundamentally change the labor equation in the farm fields of America, we'll see its impact on the immigration debate. Sort of how UAVs are changing aerial warfare and how things like "Big Dog" will eventually change ground combat.
Kudos to the previous poster and his reference to Huey, Dewey and Louie. (Anybody remember which one survived?)
Wouldn't it be cheaper to relax the rules and allow short stay, cheaper labour from very poor countries to do the work? Surely this would be better then replacing the workers with robots when there is such a huge pool of underutilised labour in the developing world that would jump at the chance to do such work.
Dey derk er jebs!
huey dewey and louie
Here is a picture of the agro robots. It's OK, there are no goats around.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
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There are several companies that have been selling robots that milk cows for about 10 years.
What are the chances of the wheel not getting stuck in one location...still rotating like it happens with our normal wheels? Wouldn't that also count as "movement" by this principle?
Pruning and harvesting trees is a difficult problem to solve, but mathematically very interesting. After all, what is the best way to prune an apple tree or a vine? Ask two farm workers how to prune the same tree and you will get a long discussion with no definite answer, but there certainly is method in the madness, which could be reduced to a tree algorithm. This is the 21st century evolution of the the 20th century automatic harvesters for simple grain/grass crops.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I saw this idea in a book from my school library in the 80's along with many other fantastic ideas such as hosting the 2000 Olympics on the Moon and a transatlantic tunnel. I believed that by the year 2000, we would have such fantastic technology and be freed of the burden of hard manual labour by robots and be free to pursue other endeavours. But roll on 2011 and now we are only just testing this technology.
But I guess the future is taking longer than I thought to become a reality. But then again if robots were doing everything for us then what would we do? We would find something I guess, you would have more time for many other pursuits if you had a team of agricultural robots taking care of all the harvesting, sowing and herding the sheep in to be shorn. And even baling the wool for you. There would still be jobs to maintain those robots and program them. Unless they learn to program and repair/manufacture themselves...
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
America, in fact the west, has a serious issue with illegals. However, the west, is by far, the worst. We have neo-cons that encourage illegals to be here working for below prevailing wages, while not paying taxes. Then we have dems leaders that push for amnesty and allowing more illegals in, as long as they get amnesty. That is just plain twisted. Now, why do these illegals come to America (and canada, EU, UK, and Australia)? Because even below minimum wage, they still make more money than what they make in their own nations. The problem is that western levels of goods, count on taxes being paid as well as re-investment in the local economy. As such illegals who work in the nation, but then send the money out of the nation, are just as bad as those that outsource to China who manipulates money, dumps monster amounts of pollution on the planet (in 2015, China will dump more than 50% of all CO2; in 2019 +-, they will have accounted for 1/2 of ALL co2 that man has ever emitted, and that assumed a slower growth path then they are on; worse, it does not include their SO2, mercury, lead, chemical pollutions, etc, etc, etc that are dumped in the Sea of China, The pacific ocean, and in our shared airs). Basically, Illegals are not cheap enough to warrent keeping them here, and the real costs is the damage to western society. Those libs that back giving jobs to illegals because they deserve it are about as stupid as as the neo-cons: they will destroy the west and esp. America, due to lack of thought.
The only real way to save the west, and ultimately, the world, is to automate. In particular, food should be automated. Right now, less than 2% of American labor goes into Ag. One of the bigger issues is that we now import a lot of food. But we increasingly import shrimp from farms in South America and Asia. How bad are these? HORRIBLE. Both use loads of anti-biotics. IN addition, they do it not in isolated ponds, but along the shoreline. THis is some of the most important areas on the earth, and it is being destroyed to send sickly shrimp to the west. Insane.
Likewise, we get loads of food from China. Hell, Nestle is now producing candy in China. SICK. At this time, upper middle class Chinese buy food from USA, Canada, Australia, and EU. Why? Because they know that the good that is coming from China is loaded with mercury, lead, and many other pollutants. And this is happening again, because China is cheating, and companies like Nestle are greedy as all hell.
Ever been on a Chinese commercial fishing boat? I have talked to a fishery person that was working on one to make certain that China was not stealing or mis-labelling. She was telling afterwards that she no longer eats fish unless it is from USA, Canada, EU, UK, or Japan. She tells me that China was the worst. Disgusting conditions.
Robotics will solve a lot of these issues. We can grow our own shrimp here cheaper than importing them. Likewise, the same is true of veggies, fish, etc.
It is time for America, and the west, to take a stand and say enough is enough. We need to quit backing those that pollute and destroy our planet. Time to put a tax on all goods based on pollution from where they come from.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I thought it was a mobile app for automated gold farming.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
I don't get this bit, the robots have laser rangefinders but no GPS, when a GPS chip is 10$ if mass purchased? And an xbee module would be 10$ more, so you can mass control them... Something doesn't add up here...
and so it begins... the complete elimination of human labor by the upper classes. So once agriculture and mining are completely automated (and they will be, just wait until we have robots to haul off broken/malfunctioning ones for recycle/repair.) and they've automated all manufacturing (see Foxconn in China) How long will it take for people to get fedup with 1% of the population controlling all the resources leaving everyone else with nothing? If food, mineral and energy production can all be automated why should any of us have to work to live? I'm sure someone will come up with some religious/moral BS as to why we should work. There needs to be a societal overhaul if these technologies do end up being viable. Communism didn't work when you had to wait 5 years to get a car, but if that same car can be built in 30 mins by robots, using resources mined by robots, should anyone really have to go without a car?
Eddie Albert: "The chores!"
Eva Gabor: "The stores!"
Steve Wozniak: "The cores!"
and so it begins... the complete elimination of human labor by the upper classes. So once agriculture and mining are completely automated (and they will be, just wait until we have robots to haul off broken/malfunctioning ones for recycle/repair.) and they've automated all manufacturing (see Foxconn in China) How long will it take for people to get fedup with 1% of the population controlling all the resources leaving everyone else with nothing? If food, mineral and energy production can all be automated why should any of us have to work to live? I'm sure someone will come up with some religious/moral BS as to why we should work. There needs to be a societal overhaul if these technologies do end up being viable. Communism didn't work when you had to wait 5 years to get a car, but if that same car can be built in 30 mins by robots, using resources mined by robots, should anyone really have to go without a car?
in the past workers jammed up the works in the new Machines and hackers will be a big risk.
. . . while the tundra is warming (and turning into swamps, not arable farmland), the vast subtropical regions where most of the world's population lives will be subject to desertification and/or devastating storms.
Harsh winters are GOOD for agriculture. They stir up the soil and kill off insects and weeds. We'll be getting fewer of those hard winters as things warm up.
Robot farmhands are nice for societies with lots of excess wealth. Don't expect them to save our asses.
We've been running version 1.0, a.k.a. "exploiting illegal immigrants" for too long.
Shit.
I'm just throwing this out there for the other five people that have seen this movie and know what I am talking about.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Clifford Simak would have been pleased.
You can almost certainly do this on a standard farm but likely it's going to be much much easier to do this with a hydroponics setup with side rails allowing robots to move quickly up and down the rows to place and tend the plants.
The big thing in this type of scenario I think that would still require the "human touch" so to speak would be harvesting. You could probably handle that with video recognition and soft grippers but there's still a chance of damaging the plant while picking the fruit/vegetable.
And harvesting vined plants would be problematic to say the least. Large melons and squash that are ground fruit would be particularly difficult.
I don't see "farmbas" doing harvesting any time soon. Not cheaply at least.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
"“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I have not lived.”"
-Henry David Thoreau
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
You won't have to do AI programming on the bots if you just have people operating them like waldos. What could possibly go wrong?
God spoke to me
They'll involve you in a big galactic conflict, get your aunt and uncle killed, and turns you into a mass murderer who blows up a battle station full of service personell and cleaners.
Just fix those damned water evaporators yourself!
That is nice, but I like the idea of vertical farming, a good solution for countries in the northern hemisphere where you can't grow anything outdoors between October to May. With vertical gardens you can grow inside hangars or even in standard size containers during cold period.
A lot of harvesting is already largely automated; this article's "new thing" is pre-harvest agricultural automation - specifically, using 'bots to plant stuff (or at least place seedlings and potted plants). Perhaps the foodstuffs you're describing won't be able to be automated (yet), but if it comes right down to it, we can grow our own tomatoes, melons, and squash to supplement the mass-produced (read: automated) foodstuffs like grains and tree-borne fruit. If bots can plant seeds, other bots can water/fertilize those seeds, and yet other bots can harvest the product, it'll be a revolution in the agricultural industry. The price still needs to come down, since they're targeting the "$25,000 to $50,000 per unit" price range, but all it will take is someone realizing they can still make a profit selling nearly the exact same thing for 10% of the price, making up the difference in volume - Selling an item for 10% of the profit will likely generate 20x the sales, thus actually generating twice the profit - something the music/movie industries might do well to learn.
The biggest issue with agriculture, as I see it, is that we're mass-producing corn (a product with dubious nutritional value) on most of our arable land, and then turning around and producing fuel with it. That land could be put to much better use with an actual nutritionally viable crop, or even as hemp (the productive qualities of industrial hemp are too many to list in a single post, but I'll throw some basics out for general consumption, and trust google to provide more information for those who are interested: paper, textiles (clothing, fabric, rope), biofuels, construction materials (mortar, fiberboard/particleboard, cardboard), oxygen (more than trees!)... the list goes on and on and on).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
What I really need is one that understands the binary language of moisture vaporators. I wonder if they have any plans to make one.
They're barely nurserybots.
They only move nursery pots from one place to another... that's it.
Which I admit is cool to watch and I'm sure saves a lot of repetitive back-breaking labor in greenhouses and nurseries, but they're a loooong way from "farmbots".
The article misses the long term point. One day a small team of farmbots can and will replace both herbicide and insecticide and, to some extent, fertilizer. Powered by the sun, they will spend all daylight hours simply moving up and down the rows of desired plants, distinguishing them from non-desired plants by AI, and using very simple tools to remove/kill those plants. They will similarly be able to identify and kill or spot treat various undesireable "bugs" and other parasites or diseases. They will be able to do things such as loosen the soil above the root masses of the plants to permit optimal penetration of water, precisely mulch and/or fertilize each plant, replant seedlings as they die in the early going so that the field is optimally productive, and quite possibly will be able to deliver just enough water to plants to keep them healthy during at least moderate droughts.
A farmbot capable of all of these things, powered by solar cells, shouldn't cost more than $1000 in a production (not research) environment. The computer guts for it are all cheap by now. It's little more than a Roomba repurposed to "vacuum" down the rows of a field (and hardened against the elements). The hard part is just writing the software, and that's all one time capital investment. A single month's worth of work from one would likely pay for it in reduced labor and chemical costs, not to mention the price premium for "organic" food as more and more people recognize that dumping chlorinated hydrocarbons and neurotoxins onto our food year after year is probably not a really stellar idea.
This may not happen this year, or even this decade, but I think that it is very likely to be coming. Perhaps this startup won't make it. Perhaps it will, using modest success with this very humble precursor to fund gradual improvements until they achieve it. But humans haven't the patience to do the kind of work that a farmbot will do, not at any price, neither domesticated nor imported. Tireless, working from sunup to sundown, processing order of meters of row per minute it will be able to keep one or more acre of planted crop "perfectly" productive without the use of chemicals or far more expensive human time.
Oh, it may not be configured LIKE a roomba as a single crawler -- it may be more effective to build it as (for example) a single brain in a larger, more expensive chassis that can process ten or twenty rows at a time (plenty of cycles to accomplish this in a single central computer, especially with multiple cores). But it's coming.
rgb
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Why do these robots have to be autonomous? How about instead, the robots get to do the back-breaking part of the job under the direct control of a seasoned farm hand? Sheesh, would controlling a robot to weed a garden be all that much different than Farmville?
Agricultural robots, what a concept -- no dealings with La Migra or needing to work on one's Spanish. Or is it? There are a lot of crappy, dangerous jobs around -- and while it is hard to not admire those with the courage and determination to earn a living this way it should be an afront to human dignity that this is necessary. But as robots (and outsourcing) displace people who may not have either the opportunity or ability or inclination to be knowledge workers with advanced degrees -- what happens to them? I doubt that they will not just quietly and obligingly go away. Reality shows and government handouts? Soylent Green? I suspect one thing is true -- if these redundant people are not repurposed in some socially beneficial way they will remind us of their presence. I am thinking Russian revolution myself but there are probably other ways -- 'Occupy' is just the start. While we are waiting for the self-drive car to take us home we better hope it is not through a countryside being ravaged by gangs of the displaced.
I initially read farmbots as fembots :(
...will cost much more than a minimum wage laborer.
Minimum wage is for people who work within the law, since many farms hire illegal immigrants to pick their crops, they get their labor for less than minimum wage. That sad fact alone put me off the idea of owning and operating an orange grove.
Your solution to too many undocumented workers is to eliminate the job? I would suggest putting more thought in this. Yes, it might keep that money in our local economy, assuming those new machines are somehow built in America and not Taiwan, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem. If agriculture were entirely automated tomorrow, illegal immigration from Mexico would not end. All that would change is what those workers try to do. I imagine more in construction, childcare, the sex trade, etc.
When reacting to illegal immigration we Americans tend to forget that it is a difficult decision to leave your country. Most people, regardless of where they are born, don't want to leave. So when it comes down to it, the underlying problem is not why they come, but why they left where they were. The problem is the condition of Mexico. We can help them. We can help them so long as if we can forget the "it's not our responsibility" mentality and recognize that by helping Mexico, we ultimately aid our self interest.
One good first step would be legalizing marijuana. If marijuana was grown here, the FDA could check it for safety and quality, ending additive fatalities. It could be taxed. The price of marijuana would drop like a rock. Those addicted could get their fix for much less, likely reducing petty crime. And it would undercut the funding of the drug cartels in Mexico. I don't like that people use the stuff, or alcohol or tobacco for that matter, but that is hardly a good enough reason for the policies we have.
What ideas do you have for step two?
* Don't get me wrong, I think we should also crucify employers of undocumented workers in addition to helping Mexico.
I'm a bit concerned about all of this advancement to support extended population growth. My gut feeling is that we are just setting up ourselves for a big fall the more we detach ourselves from nature. Like a house of cards. It can only go so high before the entire system collapses. It's just a matter of when. For example, a high-altitude nuclear warhead my never cause bodily harm. But the EMP it releases is enough to shutdown entire nations with all microchips fried. That means no transportation and running water. Within weeks, people start dieing and bodies decomposing where they last crawled for survival. Truly scary stuff.
Agreed. Only recently did I become aware (2006) of how fragile the entire "system" is, how dependent we are on fossil fuels and oil for food, and how decrepit our infrastructure has become from negelect. There is no redundancy of critical infrastructure, no checks-and-balance on system resources, nothing. The number of humans existing today are already extended waaay past the carry capacity of the planet, and we're looking to push even further. We've created this house of cards, instead of a garden of paradise. The fall will be hard, it will happen in our lifetime (as we are already seeing/feeling the first phase of resource contention) and our children and grandchildren will pay for our wanton foolishness.
Yes, there will be people, survivors, that will carry on...presuming that the handful of idiot superpowers that exist didn't build "spoilers" (aka hardended systems that were designed to auto-retaliate against a nuclear first strike). There's already evidence that the former Soviets had built such a system and had nearly activated it several times. If we can get past these stoooopid slate-wipers that we decided to build because of our primate-driven political posturing to each other, then, yeah, an agrarian society might emerge from the ashes, although it will be much poorer for our petty sins against ourselves.
But these dark clouds are not all without a silver lining. First and foremost, educate yourself in the "old ways" of living, learn how to do things with handtools and muscle power, learn about basic intensive agriculture in your backyard (or if in a flat/apartment/condo, set up a small table-based greenhouse on your deck or window), etc. Education, you know, that thing that we keep cutting and neglecting in the United States every year, will go a long ways toward mitigating disaster for yourself. Once you achieve a basic proficiency with a given project, begin a new one and learn something, while teaching any close family members that are willing to listen.
The time to do this is growing short. The current economic meltdown is not the same as the one from the 1930's; back then we had fewer people, more natural resources, and not nearly the stupidity of today. Even if the US manages to crawl out of the hole it's created, it won't last for long, as peak resource production has already occurred for oil, and many resources are due to be depleted right around the "several decades it will take to get out of this".
In other words, this is the tip of the iceburg. The time to act is now, not tomorrow.
> The first few levels are virtual, but at some point the user's proficiency reaches a threshold, and they start moving actual plants. No need to tell them that though.
"Ender's Farm" ?
individualism in America has worked selfish greed. I don't think these people understand that helping Mexicans would help themselves.in some ways you can understand why they might not like the illegals, but even if you show them evidence that integrating these people into normal society would be beneficial to everyone these people will still have some hatred. they're just too darn selfish. it's a common problem among the baby boomers and it won't go away until that generation finally dies off.
I'd love to see a few MO and Wall-E style bots around in the garden centres. That would make my morning coffee so much more entertaining :)
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
I've seen this movie! http://www.tony5m17h.net/MatrixHumanField.gif
If you think of raw energy, let's say running an electric generator connected to a treadmill, humans are way too expensive.
A human can produce, roughly, one kilowatt-hour per day of work. Check your electricity bill to see how much it costs. Now find someone who's willing to work a full day for that pay.
No matter how harshly you treat them, even a slave would cost several orders of magnitude more.
And if these new droids do work out, I wanna transmit my application to the Academy THIS year.
I have always disliked our trade with China. The problem is that China is not just cheating, the gov. is in a cold war with the west. Basically, they are out to grab Taiwan soon and then continue the expansion esp. into areas that have traditionally belonged to others, but now have resources. The sprately islands is just one example.
Mexico is already in a civil war. That is in no small part due to America. We have large drug demands and Mexican drug lords supply it. Some because they want the money (i.e. businessmen), but for others, it is because they are terrorist and seek to inflict harm on America (zetas).
I think that we need to legalize drugs here, but regulate heavily and allow ZERO imports/exports. That will starve the many beasts in Mexico, and they will die. I would like to see closer work with Mexican universities. We can and should improve that.
We REALLY screwed up NAFTA, and all trade acts for that matter. It should have been used to not just allow trade, but it should have required top environmental conditions (I would accept American as a MINIMUM, but prefer Canada's), and Labor Laws as well (prefer a more streamline version of ours) as well as requiring money be freely traded.
Fianlly, we need to start enforcing these. China was required to change a number of things, and instead, they have gotten much worse. W/neo-cons screwed up America with that BS. We need to start enforcing the FTA with China (they honor NONE of their promises) and work towards improving all the other ones.
And this is not just Mexico, but all of Latin America that needs the help. However, bringing illegals to America and turning America into a 3rd world nation will NOT solve these other nation's issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
And you would be wrong. Based on what I have seen, integrating illegals will never happen. We did that once and it caused more issues, not solved things. Sadly, fools like yourself will continue to cause issues because you do not look at history or try for new innovations.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
BTW, legalizing pot would do little to stop druglords. The truth is that few of them make their money in pot. Zetas, who are the worst, do not bother with it, so legalizing pot would do NOTHING to stop them.
It has to be ALL drugs that are legalized, heavily regulated to prevent ANY drug lords/gang sourcing (and ideally stop any major drug company from getting into it as well; this would re-build our pharmaceutical and chemical companies). In addition, you have to stop the imports and exports of it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.