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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.
Because farmers are strange people that own guns, buy seeds from Monsanto, don't attend our poetry readings and don't live in Manhattan.
Confused!?!!???
Good luck being cheaper than darker skinned humans.
I think if someone invents such a contraption, they stand to make WAY more than a $250k prize by patenting and manufacturing the thing themselves and selling it to farmers. Really. Who would be stupid enough to give away such an invention for a mere $250k?
We've got torque-based break drives, color-based OCR, and super-tiny pressure sensors to match the torque-break drives for finer degree of control and less chance of damaging the harvested product, plus extendable arms and such.
Strap all of that to a bucket and battery on wheels and send it out into the fields.
Will work with any fruit of a different color than the surrounding vegetation, so add strawberries, raspberries, mulberries, grapes of varying cultivars, apples, oranges, tomatoes, peppers, and more to the list.
I'll take my $250K, now.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
They might have some people with ideas about how to grab blueberries at high speed.
but they're 4, 6 and 9 years old and they eat half of what they pick. the cost to maintain is far too high for their daily harvest yield.
You're talking about owls, right?
Moooooooo says the cow.You all farming cows.
Pepperidge Farms can remember that shit, I'm good. :V
I'll take my $250K, now.
You'll take your $250K when you get it working, and not until. Smarter people than you have already been trying.
If it's so easy, why don't you put a robot where your mouth is, and pick some fucking blueberries with it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Farmer Coalition Offers $250K Prize For Blueberry Picking Parrot
250k for a robot whose economic value runs to the billions. Wow. Good deal.
Fill a bucket with leaves and twigs.
Fill a bucket with berries.
Weigh them.
It's magic.
I live in Japan, and I noticed that in the last couple of months blueberries have become much more expensive. Is this a global occurrence or just a Japanese thing?
I know they are imported from the us and mexico, and that yen is weak now, but the timing doesn't match.
So anybody knows what is going on here?
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.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
We use a fairly small amount of sugar (1kg sugar for at least 4kg berries), but boil for longer to reduce the fluids, then keep the jam in the freezer. Who wants to taste just sugar?
Blueberries make excellent jam (except the pink ones, which all died). We're too far North for them, at 64N. Actually, even the alleged "high bush" blueberries take a decade to exceed a meter in height here, and the "low bush" blueberries rarely exceed half a meter. Then again, we have loads of wild blueberries.
...lieutenant.
They may be having an intoxicating effect on you.
For one... you seem to be able to talk about them until you're blue in the face.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Who?
You know things have gotten bad when people are so greedy they'd rather pay $250,000 for a robot than pay a slave laborer a few dollars per day.
It would be silly to walk back from the field to the scale every time your bucket is HALF full. You'd spend half your time walking backing and forth instead of picking berries. The reasonable thing to do is to fill your bucket (with berries) before walking back.
In Virginia the thrill of the wild berry hunt is often accompanied by a rattlesnake dance where one leaps bout trying not to get bit. If we had machines that would seek and pick wild berries the sale on anti venom would shrink. There could even be a sales slowdown for bear spray.
Now you won't need migrant farmers, and the associated leftists to defend them.
Yay capitalism!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Part of the problem is the bushes are quite irregular. A time-efficient and energy-efficient solution (though possibly not space-efficient) will probably involve forcing the bushes to grow in a particular shape, or with a particular size. So it's not really a matter of inventing the robot - it's about inventing the whole system.
And yet a nut picking machine was developed in this same way so that farmers have lower costs than imports.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.