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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.'"
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.
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?)
Dey derk er jebs!
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.
Like slavery, society is growing less tolerant of the current situation of illegal labor. Though different people have different reasons for it, a large number of people will not tolerate the situation continuing as is. Some people are feeling this desire for change and are looking for other answers and these type of robots might be one of them. Either way, we're in the beginning of a new era where there are far more people to do labor than there is need for labor. Our next great challenge will be how we address all the people who are jobless due to their labor not being needed anymore. Though there is a lot of talk of retraining for higher skilled jobs, it will not be long until robots can replace doctors, engineers, scientists, programmers and other high skilled jobs and not all of the people will be able to make that leap in the first place. Right now, things are not looking so good for us as a society.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Actually, something like this can't really take off precisely because of cheap labor. Cheap bots will only be capable of limited tasks while requiring close supervision, and expensive ones will cost much more than a minimum wage laborer.
Not too long ago I was looking into what it would cost to build a (nearly) fully automated greenhouse. The problem is, no matter how efficient or clever your system is, you simply cannot compete with the cost of human labor at the very bottom of the skills spectrum.
It is frustrating, because it seems like we should automate the more basic and repetitive tasks first, but in a market based economy, is simply isn't, well, economical.
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.
DER took ERE JERRB1!!!!!
We were told we need to go to school and get our degrees in order to avoid ending in a dead end job mowing lawns or flipping burgers. Now we're out of school, with degrees, with no jobs for us, and we're berated and jeered at because we refuse to flip burgers and mow lawns.
Why mod this down? It sounds like a valid immigration question. Or are there some secret code words we can't use on /. that I don't know about? I personally like the idea of making it easy to come to America and be productive. I would vastly prefer a simple, regulated system, to the cluster f^%k of conflicting rules that make up the current immigration morass.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
The problem is, no matter how efficient or clever your system is, you simply cannot compete with the cost of human labor at the very bottom of the skills spectrum.
Completely true. When the "cost" of a human is perhaps a few hundred dollars, beneficial technologies wither on the vine as our living standards fall trying to "compete". That is exactly what we are witnessing right now -- a race to the bottom.
in a market based economy, is simply isn't, well, economical.
A market economy can't exist without sensible government regulation of negative externalities. Immigrants are a negative externality. The US government has completely failed to regulate it.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
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?
I was thinking more Neil Young
http://michaelsmith.id.au
No, it wouldn't be cheaper. When they come here, they don't leave. They vote illegally in our fraudulent elections. They take jobs building unnecessary houses stolen from middle-class savers by the Federal Reserve's inflation tax. They send all of their earnings back to their home countries. They have five kids who are educated for free in our public schools. And they get all of their medical care from emergency rooms.
It's not fucking cheaper at all.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
No. Only an idiot would think that. The fact that somebody comes to the west to work says that even below minimum wages, they are making more than they make in other nations. So, that means that costs of goods is STILL TOO EXPENSIVE. To lower the costs, you have to automate. Simply outsourcing will only serve to destroy the west and turn it into looking like Central America or Northern Africa (poor and uneducated).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Oh and I forgot the most important part -- our criminal government uses them as an excuse to turn the US into an Orwellian nightmare.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
BS. I know LOADS of kids around my area that will be HAPPY to flip burgers and mow lawns. The problem is that many of the fast foods are owned by foreigners and hired loads of hispanics that can not speak any english, and who obviously do not live in this area. IOW, they are racists, so the local kids suffer.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Poppycock. If we send back all of the illegals, then our unemployment will be around 5%. Then we move forward on automation. That is what we did from the mid 1800-1980. Starting in 1980, our nation was gutted by 2 presidents. They encouraged the outsourcing of manufacturing, as well as bringing loads of illegals. Heck, one of the 2 idiots gave amnesty to all of the illegals, but then did NOTHING to prevent future illegals.
We need to modify HR2885 to be a bit stronger, as well as add a modified dream act to it (treat the victims differently from the criminals). Those that were raised here, speak english (i.e. culturally are Americans), are in school, or have a GED or better, and have no legal issues (other than being illegal) and have ZERO association with gangs, should be allowed to earn citizenship after completing all of the previous and doing service for America. HR2885 requires e-verify. Not a total solution, but far far better than what we have. In addition, once all businesses are required to use it, it is VERY effective.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
BS. America can not afford to outsource everything. It is destroying us. Far far better to automate the low end jobs. As it is, even the illegals are not working those. Less than 5% of all illegals work in Ag. The majority work in Service (restaurants, janitorial, etc) and CONSTRUCTION. How good of pay is in Construction? Well, many of these illegals are under paid at 60K/year. How do they make 60/year? They do not pay taxes. Far better to automate the Ag portions (easier to do than you can believe), much of the service, and even parts of construction. Then not only will we have much lower unemployment (send back all illegals except for those that qualify for dream act; that would give us about 5% unemployment), but we would have less drains on gov. and improved tax collections.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
we're out of school, with degrees, with no jobs for us
What kind of degrees?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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.
They'd, though, rather demand a government check for doing nothing.
Citation badly needed.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
. . . 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.
See, this is the problem. A human can milk a cow within about 15 minutes.
After 9 1/2 years or so of being robo-milked, a typical cow is udderly exhausted.
15 minutes, twice a day, for nine years, is 100,000 hours of human labor. How long do you think it takes to birth a new cow?
That isn't the problem. The problem is that our goddamn government and banking system SUBSIDIZES HUMANS SO THAT THEY CAN DO SHITTY JOBS FOR SLAVE WAGES.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Alabama recently passed a "tough new immigration law". It has not helped the unemployment rate. Americans don't WANT tough, dirty, low paying farm work.
<URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-alabamas-immigration-law-is-crippling-its-farms/2011/11/01/gIQAg0JvjM_story.html>
<URL:http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/makingsense_10-28.html>
<URL:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/21/after-alabama-immigration-law-few-americans-taking-immigrants-work_n_1023635.html>
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44981872/ns/us_news-life/t/few-americans-take-immigrants-jobs-alabama/
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
And it wasn't that long ago (just a generation or two) that our kids did all the same work that illegals do today. Every kid had a summer job, on the farm or in some related capacity.
I've sometimes thought that a required period of such labour (perhaps earning college money in escrow) would put a different perspective into the heads of today's youth.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Depends on the farm. A smaller farm owned by a family might be best off with some bots like this, assuming a reasonable price. Hiring people is expensive. Employee theft, insurance needed for lawsuits, payroll taxes, hiring supervisors, dealing with unemployment claims, etc. Large farms have the infrastructure for this. Smaller family farms are better served by dealing with getting something mechanical/electronic working that can do a basic job well.
I've been seeing this with some crops. An acquaintance has a tractor that is completely automated when it comes to tilling, planting, and harvesting. He sets GPS beacons, fills the tractor up with fuel, and at the right schedule the thing moves around the farm, stopping when the wheat hopper is full for manual dumping, and when that is done, the tractor continues where it left off.
There is no shame in automating these cheap jobs. This means that migrant kids actually might get to go to school instead of going to age 18 with not even a completed elementary school education because they are in the fields.
China is doing this too... they know that the US has the ability to stop food shipments at any time, so have been developing technologies to make arable land in the Sahel and other parts of Africa to feed their population, and part of that is automated tilling/planting/irrigation/harvesting.
Humans consume resources. If you're concerned about limited resources, you should be concerned with limiting human population growth. Hiring immigrants does exactly the opposite -- it subsidizes population growth and provides a "relief valve" for failed governments.
I'll repeat that for you in case you missed it. Welcoming immigrants simply perpetuates the poverty and the oppressive governments you seem to be so concerned about.
Walling most of them out would absolutely make us more prosperous, because we have more resources per capita than anywhere on Earth. In the long run it would make them more prosperous as well.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
Not too long ago I was looking into what it would cost to build a (nearly) fully automated greenhouse. The problem is, no matter how efficient or clever your system is, you simply cannot compete with the cost of human labor at the very bottom of the skills spectrum.
That's easy enough to fix. Just have the workers unionize. That will triple the cost of your human labor right there and then your robots become cost effective.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Let's look at some numbers, then. Assuming these bots have a relatively low cost of operation, (big if, I know), and they each cost $30K, and you need at least a 100% in three-year return, then you'd have to generate $10K/year of utility. The minimum cost for people is $7.50/hour minimum wage (a grossly under-accurate simplification). Assuming the robots can be kept busy, and assuming their time must be worth $10K/year, their hourly cost becomes 10000 / (365 * 24) or $1.14 / hour. In the video, they don't appear to meed much supervision. At least, just for the task of shuffling pots back and forth between defined areas. It sounds as though you had a capacity utilization problem. Did your automation sit idle most of the day?
While I object to what Alabama had in there, and the fact that it was not that effective (does not go after all of the illegals), but it did just go in and it IS having the desired and positive effect.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
An example? Most if the farmers I recall in his stories were real human people.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Now we're out of school, with degrees, with no jobs for us, and we're berated and jeered at because we refuse to flip burgers and mow lawns.
I will refer you to this , which I saw on reddit the other day. It is interesting.
Also, I attribute the economic pain we are feeling now on the effects of the world slowly approaches an "average" standard of living. So as the very large third world get a slightly bit richer, the very small first world must get a LOT poorer.
So the "I did everything I was told, I have a college degree, and I demand to stay at my childhood standard of living" argument is valid, but simply not going to happen. In a world of limited resources, "fair" counts for absolutely nothing.
More likely it was a "cost of capital" problem. As in, the artificial cost of capital is manipulated by the US central bank in order to prevent small-scale automation. Not knowing this is a surefire way to invest in a dishwashing robot right before the borders are opened, a war is started, and interest rates lowered in order to consolidate the control of productive capital in the hands of the central bankers. Good luck paying off your business loan when Mexicans willing to work for $2/hr are knocking down your door looking for work and all the trained Americans are either dying in some third world dirt farm or making twice as much doing nothing on Wall St.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I tend to think required death panels would put a different perspective in the heads of the geezers...
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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
"expensive ones will cost much more than a minimum wage laborer."
And of course the whole point of illegals is you don't have to pay them minimum wage.
This is square peg/ round hole stuff. It's generally not cost effective to force machinery into a role that was defined by the task itself to be done by human labor. "Farming", as it has existed for thousands of years, is the problem here. The solution is to throw away the entire process and build it from scratch to be handled entirely by machinery. Then it's simply not necessary to worry about "humanoid" machinery and its inherent problems and weaknesses.
Build hydroponic beds in layers a hundred feet high. Make infrastructure weigh tons if that's more efficient and resilient. Machinery and hydraulics are orders of magnitude faster and more powerful than mere humans. Use those strengths to redefine the entire food and organic materials production industries the way it redefined the heavy industries of the 20th century. Ever watch a robot stuff tiny components into a machine-made PC board? Ever watch a wave-soldering machine? The electronics we are all using right now to participate in this forum wouldn't even be possible if millions of our devices had to be built by hand using microscopes and tweezers, regardless of how little the workers were paid. The entire modern electronic age was built with machines. It's time for the production of our food to be automated too.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
Assuming the robots can be kept busy, and assuming their time must be worth $10K/year, their hourly cost becomes 10000 / (365 * 24) or $1.14 / hour. In the video, they don't appear to meed much supervision. At least, just for the task of shuffling pots back and forth between defined areas. It sounds as though you had a capacity utilization problem. Did your automation sit idle most of the day?
That is the big issue, in a greenhouse, yes, it must sit idle most of the time. Plants are slow. Also, a productive automation system needs to do a lot more than shuffle pots. There are some other factors involved in a complete automation setup.
For instance, say you want to automate the greenhouse for month long intervals (or longer) between visits because you don't live where you bought the land/warehouse space. There is a lot that can go wrong during a month, so everything has to work. You need to monitor water, air, light, and nutrient quality, and adjust it accordingly. Plants must be transplanted, harvested, and packaged at intervals (really complicated), not to mention that there would be different procedures for different plant varieties. Something has to monitor the plants for bugs or disease, which I honestly haven't figured out. On top of the complexity, there is a lot of power required to run all of that, especially the lights required in high latitudes near me. Definitely more than some hundred watt droids.
I would love to do it, for sure, but at this point it just makes more economic sense to do it with humans, outside, at low latitudes.
"“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."
Agreed, these bot farm workers _need_ an electrified fence.
That too :/
Doesn't Israel still have a requirement for national service?
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Hahaha, yes, I do find that emphasis hilarious. But no, nothing so pedestrian. I'm talking coffee, tea, and tropical fruit above 45 degrees North. A steep order I know.
Simply outsourcing will only serve to destroy the west
Sadly enough, I'm considering moving to India so I can get a job in the IT field in the US market.
I wish I were joking.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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.
I and members of my family *see* families who have been on welfare since the 1980s, and who's large front yard barbecues indicate a distinct lack of physical and mental disability.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
How about doing the disease monitoring yourself in the first incarnation? A high quality webcam mounted on one of the bots would do the trick wouldn't it? You could just take a look once a week to ensure that nothing has gone disastrously wrong. I've never tried doing robotic vision processing before, but looking for certain colours of disease spots or green flies or whatever shouldn't be that hard either. Also you could have the bots notify you when things look drastically different to the previous day/6 hours/whatever.
which is totally what she said
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.
China is doing this too... they know that the US has the ability to stop food shipments at any time, so have been developing technologies to make arable land in the Sahel and other parts of Africa to feed their population, and part of that is automated tilling/planting/irrigation/harvesting.
WHAT?
1. Sahel is a part of the Sahara desert with probably the worst famine problem in the world. Part of the problem is that the land is being over used and then turns into desert.
Over-farming, over-grazing, and over-population of marginal lands and natural soil erosion have caused serious desertification of the region.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahel
2. Now, are we aware that Eurasia and Africa aren't one little island west of USA? The closest land route between China and Sahel would be something like 4500km and it would go over the hills, (other) deserts and through countries with not so friendly governments, bandits and areas with no roads. The sea transport would take months.
3. In EU the overproduced wheat (side effect of the EU's agricultural market stabilization measures) is being burnt because it would be too expensive to ship it to .. Sahel for example.
4. I am probably answering to a troll, again. I am not going to delete the post this time.
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".
Fahrenheits, but most jobs require Celsiuses now.
I think that you err, in your assumptions about the job market. The automotive industry managed to replace tens of thousands of workers with dumb-bots, decades ago. And, these bots don't sound especially "smart". Face it - it doesn't take much processing power to evaluate a cucumber's readiness for harvest, or the myriad of other tasks involved in agriculture.
The sensors, software, and hardware are so cheap today, that even a pretty poor person can construct a bot to perform such simple tasks. Once the industry matures a little bit, the bots can probably be left running 24/7/365. The bots can even be programmed to return to a charging station when they run out of power. Self diagnostics can inform the bot when it's worn or damaged, at which time it would (attempt to) return to a repair station. While they may not be competitive with cheap labor today, I expect that at some time in the near future, they can and will be. The margin is obviously close enough today, that some people are willing to experiment with them.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The average person, world wide, does little more than consume food and pursue sexual relations. Some take another route, consuming food and pursuing drug induced highs. Humanity isn't going to do anything more valuable with their time than they are already doing. In fact, picking produce would be a step up for a large number of Americans. Take a tour of your nearest housing project. I don't much care whether you live in a large city with ghettos, or if you live out here in Outback, Nowhere. Our county jail is overpopulated with good for nothings who haven't earned enough honest money in their lifetimes to pay for their incarceration.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I always seem to have mod points - but not today. Benjamin certainly deserves some mod points. Unfortunately - some fool or another will probably mod him (and me) down, because they believe us to be xenophobic, and/or prejudiced. Phhht.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
A little secret about those GPS tractors that you didn't hit on:
They work out the most efficient plowing, planting, and harvesting routes, as well. If you or I climbed on a tractor, we would just drive from end to end of the field, only varying our course for a tree or something. The GPS guided tractor maps out every single pass, before it ever starts. The result is a modest increase in crop yield. I emphasize "modest" - but if a farmer realizes a 3% increase in crop yield, with the very same investment, he has more money to spend on - uhhh - more robots?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
"Actually, something like this can't really take off precisely because of cheap labor."
Boot the cheap labor back to its countries of origin and that can kickstart the process. Agricultural labor is a job for machines, and if the machines aren't quite there yet that doesn't mean they won't be.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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?
That may be true, but then, Mexicans get paid more than 2 bucks a day. Fortunately for everyone, businesses sitting down to do the math eliminate such ridiculous hyperbole from the word "Go."
"I know that every word that man just said is true, because it's EXACTLY what I wanted to hear." -- Space Ghost
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 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 cameras on the roof of the greenhouse 20bucks a piece, blinking serial indicators to show which bot is which 2 bucks per robot.
I guess the cost efficiency comes from not needing server software. maybe they got quotes from some expensive warehouse monitoring company on how much that costs..
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
No, and one advantage is keeping "Third World" workers OUT of modern countries.
Like it or not, exclusivity protects economic advantage.
Get rid of the need for cheap labor (which exclusively comes from "less accomplished" humans) and you can keep such humans from burdening your society.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
...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.
Poppycock. If we send back all of the illegals, then our unemployment will be around 5%.
Unemployment stats come from people seeking work who cannot find it. Do you think any of the current unemployment benefit collectors will step up and do farm work out in the sun for minimum wage? Do you think the farmers are ready to pay minimum wage to their workers?
Your post is modded funny, but it's true. And it's the reason that unions are dying. The nature of unions is inherently to make labor more expensive. The employer has to pay significant costs for negotiators, then pay for whatever increase in benefits the union negotiates for the employees. There is no real opportunity for savings; it's pretty much a zero-sum game.
So the union comes in, the labor costs go up, then the employer realizes that with the new, higher labor costs, the cost of moving the operation to China is now substantially less than the wage differential between US union employees and Chinese sweatshop workers. Naturally the same calculus applies comparing union labor to automation, with the additional advantage that you don't need to move your factory away from where your consumers are.
Even where the employer has no opportunity for automation or off-shoring, if the employer has competitors with non-union labor then over time the non-union competitor will have more profits to use for expansion, will be able to undercut the union employer's prices, etc., with the result that companies without union employees grow and companies with union employees shrink.
The exception is government employees' unions. When those unions get more concessions, it allows them to charge higher dues without the employees feeling the pinch, which allows them to spend more money lobbying for more union contracts and union benefits, creating (depending on whether you're a government union employee or a taxpayer) a virtuous or vicious cycle of ever more tax dollars going to government union employees.
Right, because the central bank has an interest in preventing small-scale automation. How does that help them, exactly?
There is a cheaper way to do this. You subsidize the machines. Make them cheaper than cheap labor. Then you immediately have huge demand that builds economies of scale, which allows you to phase out the subsidy over time once economies of scale have made the automation cost lower than the cheap labor cost.
Actually, in most industries the point of illegals is that you don't have to pay workmen's comp. Tyson didn't get caught three times paying truckers $200/head to bring mojados to its Arkansas chicken processing plants because they were having trouble finding rednecks willing to work for minimum wage. They wanted them because when the worker gets hurt or suffers from repetitive stress injuries a simple call to La Migra and they don't have to worry about their insurance going up.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
That is part of the problem. Some people still love manual labor. Keeps me in great shape. And i don't have to waste money at a gym. The part i don't like, is how manual labor gets very little respect in the US anymore. If your not a desk jockey you are shit. Which is sad many other countries still have great respect for those that do manual labor. Part of the reasoning i know we get so little respect is most manual labor jobs have not seen in increase in wage in almost two decades. So if you do that kind of job even if you are paid well. Most look at you as below them.
Do you think any of the current unemployment benefit collectors will step up and do farm work out in the sun for minimum wage? Do you think the farmers are ready to pay minimum wage to their workers?
No. To both. But then again, neither do the illegals. Illegal immigrants work in many sectors of the U.S. economy. According to National Public Radio in 2005, about 3 percent work in agriculture; 33 percent have jobs in service industries; and substantial numbers can be found in construction and related occupations (16 percent), and in production, installation, and repair (17 percent).[5] According to USA Today in 2006, about 4 percent work in farming; 21 percent have jobs in service industries; and substantial numbers can be found in construction and related occupations (19 percent), and in production, installation, and repair (15 percent), with 12% in sales, 10% in management, and 8% in transportation.[6] Illegal immigrants have lower incomes than both legal immigrants and native-born Americans, but earnings do increase somewhat the longer an individual is in the country.[5]
A percentage of illegal immigrants do not remain indefinitely but do return to their country of origin; they are often referred to as “sojourners: they come to the United States for several years but eventually return to their home country."[7]
And those numbers are what we KNOW about. It is very likely that the numbers are very skewed. The chances are the that the illegals occupy far more in the non-ag sector. So, these robots will simply not take away that many jobs, but will keep an industry locals.
The ag argument for illegals is nonsense. Total and 100% pure nonsense. The fact that they chose to come here proves that they make more money here doing that work, then doing it at their home nation. After all, if they made more there, they would stay there. So, the ONLY way to lower our costs, is to automate it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
All I know, from personal experience, was that in the '80s and early '90s, you never saw an "immigrant" face in town in central Florida orange picking country. At that time, they slept in the fields, kept out of sight. Somewhere in the late '90s, the whole amnesty thing finally started gaining trust in the community, all of a sudden there were lines 20 people deep waiting to talk on a payphone, huge groups (like 20 and 30 people) would pool their money and rent a trailer together, buy a big old heap of a car and load 9 and 10 at a time into it - blast down the highway having the thrill of a lifetime I'm sure...
Over the last 10 years, they have started to integrate into the communities a little better, but there are still massive drug problems that spill over into the "non immigrant" population, not that the drug problems weren't there in the non immigrants before, but now the immigrants are clearly having as much problem with crack as the native Americans have had with alcohol for the last 100 years.
My point, if there is one, is that census and survey based statistics about this population are shaky at best, most likely twisted to the pre-determined views of the statistic gatherer.
I'm all for automation of farming, especially orange grove maintenance and harvesting... but, it will be a long long time before the machines are cheaper to build and maintain than a (pardon the prejudices) trailer dwelling family of crackheads. For one thing, the hidden costs of the family are spread onto social services, supported by the taxpayers instead of the employers.
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 keep hearing about these people, but have yet to meet one. They must stay carefully hidden, like the Cadillac-driving welfare queens, and the illegal aliens who live on welfare and vote. How do you penetrate the invisibility screen?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Know someone in the Post Office who delivers their monthly checks.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
have ZERO association with gangs
Then you're going to exclude everyone who lives in a poor neighborhood, I take it? In fairness, you probably haven't lived anywhere that the gangs were more visible/powerful than the local police, but many of those people who do are the illegals. They don't have any choice about whether they deal with the gangs or not.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
I've seen this movie! http://www.tony5m17h.net/MatrixHumanField.gif
Sorry I wasn't more clear. The central bank has an interest in controlling capital. They do so by, basically, money printing. Centralization is really just a side effect.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
many other countries still have great respect for those that do manual labor.
Name one.
most manual labor jobs have not seen in increase in wage in almost two decades
Because those jobs will never show an improvement in productivity. There's a limit on how big a wheelbarrow a man can push, beyond that you need a truck and then it ceases being manual labor.
I have no doubt many people love doing manual labor, but as a hobby, not as a job. You may be willing to take up gardening instead of paying to use a gym, but you wouldn't pay another guy for the right to dig his garden.
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.
> Humans consume resources. If you're concerned about limited resources,
I don't like this tiny little box you think in. What about colonizing space? What about economic systems of the machine age where people don't have to work to live at a decent standard?
It's because of fear like yours that I don't have my flying car yet.
So tell me how a a paper pusher has increased how much they can do as well. Your counter falls flat on its face.
Computers. Office jobs are much fewer but better paying than 30 years ago.
Something has to monitor the plants for bugs or disease, which I honestly haven't figured out.
I work at a company that produces data loggers and sensors, some of our lines are made for soil temperature/moisture and ambient temperature. We can set real time alarms for various parameters and you would be surprised how many disease/pest vectors can be determined by soil conditions and ambient temperatures only. Set real time alarms for conditions that are statistically linked to the vectors and when the alarms are triggered the farm bots can take action in accordance (pesticides, fungicides, etc...)
The reason that falls on its face. Is you are saying that tools have improved the productivity of white collar workers but tools have done nothing to improve blue collar workers productivity. If you think tools have done nothing to improve our productivity. You really should not be commenting on something that you know little about.
Automation costs. Big time. It is precisely the small guy who can't afford it.
A non-robotic example. I grow trees in containers. So every year I plant about 5000 seedlings into styroblocks. The ones that don't sell after two years move to 2 gallon pots. About 3000 of them. The ones that dont sell as 2 gallon trees move to 10 gallon pots. About 1000 of them.. So every year I transplant about 8000 trees. I use about 3 dump truck loads of potting soil per year.
At present I do this by hand. One scoup or shovel full at a time. The smallest ones take 15 s each, the 2 gallon ones take 30 s each. The 10 gallon ones take 3 min each.
There is a machine out there that can provide a recirculating 'water fall' of soil. It's noisy. It's dusty. And it costs $30,000. It would cost me another 10,000 to provide power to it. This has the potential to cut my time by about 50% not counting breakdowns and maintenance.
A fully automated machine is about 80,000 and requires 4 people to run it, and another crew of 6 to haul the potted plants away. It has to be reset and adjusted every time the soil moisture changes, every time the pot changes, every time the tree being planted changes. It's a great way to work, if you are doing 100,000 poinsettias for the Christmas trade.
Now this is simple stuff. Motor, links, pnuematic/hydraulic acatuators. Everything that moves has very limited degrees of freedom, and few require feedback or sensors.
I don't think that wheel rotation is sufficient for a farmbot, unless the farm is kept perfectly flat. Pocket gopher hill? divot in the sod? Mud puddle? Wet grass? Clump of bunch grass? Area missed by the mower? Wheelbarrow left in the way? Basket of chip mulch? A fence post left where it fell off the truck?
How about weeding? Can a farmbot recognize a weed? No? There goes 25% of my use. Can it walk (roll) an irrigation line, and spot clogged drip emmiters, or replace a broken one? Can it poke a finger into the soil and decide if this block of trees needs watering? And then go and set the water, keeping track of how many places water is currently running so as to not overload the capacity of the system. Can it operate my lawnmower? Run a weed eater, spot a leaking pipe while on the way to do something else. Can it deal with 60 different kinds and sizes of pots, and 80 species of trees?
I have a high school kid who works with me after school. He and I working together set up a new irrigation block. This requires: .725 plastic tubing.
* Drilling 4 holes with a dirt auger.
* Setting 4 fence posts.
* Screwing two 12 foot 2x4's to the posts.
* Drilling 5 holes for
* Stringing 1240 feet of tubing.
* Punching a 0.120 hole every 3 feet in that tubing.
* Inserting a dripper into that hole.
* Connecting the source ends into a manifold.
* Pressuring the system and checking for leaks.
He and I working together did it in about 5 hours. The next week, I marked out where the next one would go, and told him, 'your project'.
The only help he needed was with the auger. The soil was dry there, and it needed both of us leaning on it to get enough down pressure to get the bit to bite.
Automating your income taxes is easy compared to automating a farm worker.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
A 1.5 ton pickup truck today carries the same cargo as a 1.5 ton truck did in 1981. A desktop computer today is more powerful than the biggest supercomputer they had in 1981.
Yes, the relative evolution of machinery has improved the productivity of some workers more than others.
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.
You are correct that I know nothing about gangs. However, I do know illegals personally. And none of them live around gangs.
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.
They're comparatively lucky, then. A couple of my nephews grew up in the slums of Lima, Peru, and when one of them was here he worked with a number of Latinos who grew up in East LA, Houston, Miami, etc. They all echoed the reality that when one lives in a neighborhood dominated by gang bangers you have no choices beyond 1) be friendly with them, or 2) be victimized daily by them. Any idea of protection by the police as they do their twice-daily drive through the neighborhood in their patrol cars is a joke.
In response to the almost-inevitable question of 'why do they live there', the simple reply is where else are they going to live when they arrive with no money, no job, and no family, and when they do get a job how are they going to build up enough assets to move to a 'better' neighborhood when they send a quarter or more of their pitifully-small paycheck back home to support their families?
Welcome to their world.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin