Farmer Coalition Offers $250K Prize For Blueberry Picking Robot (robohub.org)

Hallie Siegel writes: Having spent many a back breaking hour in deep woods Ontario picking wild blueberries in summer time, I can only imagine the challenge of farming and harvesting these awesome little flavour nuggets. Blueberries are in record demand (probably my son alone accounts for a significant percentage of that!) so it's no surprise, really, that a coalition of farmers has banded together to offer a prize for automated blueberry picking solutions. We've seen competitions and challenges spur innovation in other areas of robotics — think robocar — why not blueberry picking? Can't wait to see the results of this one.

Comments

Re:Cost

[KGIII]

I live in the home of the Great Wild Maine Blueberry and it is nommy. For starters, you're correct. We have no brown people until harvest season - then we have a lot of them. They stick around for the apple picking season. Then they disappear like the wind. Often, they're Jamaican. I have no idea why. A buddy doesn't hire them, they're from a separate company supplied by Wyman Blueberry or something or other. He hires locals.

Also, blueberries are seldom "picked" per se. Some, very few, are hand-picked and those will cost you a small fortune. The Wild Maine Blueberry (which is nommy) is a low-bush plant and not to be confused with cultivated berries which are larger and, often, on taller plants. The blueberries are raked with a device that is similar to a cranberry rake, they just have less space between the tines. You gently pull the rake up, from beneath the berries, and tilt it forward while pulling gently upwards. You repeat this until the berries fill the back portion. Then, leaving some space for the wind to blow, you dump the berries into your pail. Why? The wind winnows out the berries and your bucket will be heavier and the berries cleaner.

You also do it gently so that you squish fewer berries - berries that are squished are suitable only for the cannery. Berries that go to the cannery don't make as much money. Unfortunately, most berries go to the cannery these days. You need to know the right people to be able to get the good stuff - which I do. I generally get an obscene amount of berries and freeze them after cleaning them. I also make blueberry jelly and blueberry pie. I can't seem to make a good jam, however. I just can't get it so that it's not runny. I'll learn...

There's quite an art to raking them. As I mentioned above, I've a friend who owns around 500 acres of berries. I get some healthy exercise helping him out. In the spring we go and burn the fields every other year. We put chemicals on the fields to kill the Poplar tree saplings. We put hay on the fields after the season is over - that's burned off the following year, in the spring, while the snow is still in the woods but not in the fields - as it is wont to do, most years. They've an automated burning machine but that's set a hill, down in Vienna, ME, ablaze on more than one occasion. He (which also seem to mean me most years) doesn't subscribe to that highfalutin newfangled stuff - it's done the way it was done by his father before and his father before that. Legend says, his grand father was the one to invent the blueberry winnowing machine. I've no idea of the veracity, they're all liars.

Truth be told, I'm not quite sure how I got roped into helping. I started just buying blueberries but soon got asked if I wanted to see how it worked. Not long after, I was invited to give it a shot. Pretty soon, I'd filled my belly and my pail was empty. This meant that I should probably give him money. So, I gave him money but was told I should probably fill a pail. Soon, that turned into a few. Eventually, I figured out that I was paying to work. I'm not quite sure how that state of affairs happened but I did stop paying and now I don't actually pay for my heap of berries but I earn them by helping out. He's offered to pay me, numerous times, but I think he only offers to be polite and knowing that I'll decline.

If you've never had the Nommy Wild Maine Blueberry then you're missing out. They're not as sweet as the cultivated berries and, often times, not as large. However, they're full of flavor and my doctor (another lying bastard) tells me that they're good for me. He's probably a member of the blueberry cartel. There is actually quite a bit of money in blueberries, they're one of the highest paying crops around. They're just finicky and a bitch to harvest. They do have automated raking machines but they don't actually result in berries you'd want to buy unless you were buying them canned. Let's just say, they don't treat the berries right.

So, while someone may develop a machine to autonomously harvest berries,

Re:Cost

[KGIII]

There are indeed. I've tried quite a few of the various species over the years. I love my blueberries. I recently shared a story about them... Lemme see if I can find it... Nope, was more than a few days ago. Basically, as a wee toddler - not much larger - 3 - 5 years old, I ate some blueberries and, as it turns out, they were inside bear poop. Yup... I ate bear poop blueberries. *sighs* I was sharing it when someone was alarmed about their being power lines near their house and worried about their kids.

I really don't like the cultivated berries as much. Sure, they're sweeter but they also feel mealy. They're just not as good. I don't know if I have had the variety you speak of but it's possible. If you ever get to my neck of the woods, I'll share some of my stash with you. We have one subspecies, I'm not even sure if it has a name, that you find in patches. They're dark, almost black. They also tend to grow a bit larger. They are the epitome of heaven in a little package direct from Mother Nature herself. I usually separate those out and gorge myself on them instead of being patient and freezing them.

Man, I'm hundreds of miles from home and my stash of blueberries. Stupid Slashdot...

Too little to be serious ... put up real money!

[fygment]

Presumably a prototype has to be built, right? Because no one would be stupid enough to give a prize for a plan on paper, right?

So how many decent prototypes would an inventor have to go through before there's a decent working model?

And if each prototype costs $10-20k, the actual reward for the inventor gets smaller and smaller ... so small that only garage builders are likely to give it a try. A bona fide company with resources, say engineers/techs at $60K a year, machine shops, taxes, are unlikely to give the matter any thought. A university might, but then you will have to wait several years.

TL:DR - you get what you pay for. Put up a $1 million dollar prize and you might see some serious interest.

Re:Easily done

[Khyber]

I grew blueberries of many cultivars in South Carolina. I'm well aware of rabbit-eye and highbush and more cultivars.

Jeeze, you'd think a HORTICULTURAL RESEARCH DIRECTOR wouldn't have already thought about this stuff. It's REALLY easy to pick a blueberry. It's really easy to determine when the appropriate harvest time for any given berry has arrived - it's touch and color-based.

A raking machine? Well no fucking wonder so many get damaged. As I said, WE HAVE PRESSURE-SENSITIVE ROBOTICS, hell they've been featured on slashdot HUNDREDS OF TIMES. Yet you seem to have thrown all that prior knowledge away.

And with that, I bid you adieu. Anyone that takes their fruit that 'seriously' while failing to actually address anything I've brought up has some serious mental issues that need to be dealt with first before they should ever be allowed to interact with the general public again.