[HN Gopher] Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chem...
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Robot treats 500k plants per hour with 95% less chemicals [video]
Author : zikohh
Score : 743 points
Date : 2022-11-16 20:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| zurtri wrote:
| I am waiting for this kind of tech to become viable for smaller
| 'hobby' type farms. you know, under 100 acres.
|
| To get the spraying done by firing up a few drones would be
| excellent.
|
| Particularly with weeds that are in hard to reach places on the
| farm.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _I am waiting for this kind of tech to become viable for
| smaller 'hobby' type farms. you know, under 100 acres._
|
| Yup. I've got four acres of grass that I'd love to farm...
| without having the farm be a full time job.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| > I am waiting for this kind of tech to become viable for
| smaller 'hobby' type farms.
|
| And, you know, cheap. And usable in difficult terrain.
|
| I can't imagine my father, or any farmer who does their job at
| small scales here in developing countries, being able to afford
| technology like that.
| Axien wrote:
| Actually you would hire the "drone guy" to spray your fields.
| No need to buy drones for use a few times a year.
| prawn wrote:
| They're very smartly having this work as a tractor attachment
| so they're not reinventing the literal wheels. For small farms,
| a scaled-down version could be pushed along like a wheelbarrow
| or attached to something like an ATV or ride-on mower.
|
| But at the home garden scale, I'd like to see a dog-sized
| spider-like robot that would roam the block doing this. It can
| be very hard to keep soil weed free, and then weed it once it
| isn't.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| iio7 wrote:
| While we're at it, let's get rid of the chemicals. There is no
| situation in which the toxic chemicals doesn't create a whole new
| set of problems.
| fknorangesite wrote:
| > There is no situation in which the toxic chemicals doesn't
| create a whole new set of problems.
|
| True, but the issue though is the problem they _solve_ :
| famine.
| loceng wrote:
| They can still be used as a bridge to when new systems are
| ready to replace the old.
| loceng wrote:
| You could just burn the leaves of what you don't want to grow,
| right?
| karmaMeansCool wrote:
| Please don't have opinion that are different from everyone
| else.
| [deleted]
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Love these types of advances though I wonder if weeds and pests
| will adapt to outwit the robot or if our ability to adapt
| automation to such changes simply will always/usually be too
| rapid for nature to keep up.
| searine wrote:
| Pests will adapt to physical pest control like fire or crop
| rotation by timing their life cycles to avoid it. Robots aren't
| any different in that regard, if used without care pests could
| hypothetically adapt to their usage.
|
| The key to preventing this kind of adaptation is multiple modes
| of action. Robots do offer that ability because they can be
| used to both physically remove pests, and also chemically treat
| pests like in the video.
|
| If you have two to three robust modes of action, you can
| basically prevent resistance from happening entirely.
| goalieca wrote:
| Firmware updates happen a lot faster than evolution. I
| personally like the laser one and mechanical weeders
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| Evolution might hijack the firmware update process now.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Well if the weeds adapt into corn to outwit the robot that
| wouldn't be too bad.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| Fun fact, that's sort of how we got Rye.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Wow, thanks for that fact!
|
| >It is possible that rye traveled west from Asia Minor as a
| minor admixture in wheat (possibly as a result of
| Vavilovian mimicry), and was only later cultivated in its
| own right.[0]
|
| Also found this about rye while looking that up:
|
| >Recently, scholars have discovered that rye, more than
| other domesticated crops has followed a weedy species type
| of domestication process--from wild to weed to crop and
| then back to weed again.[1]
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rye
|
| [1]https://www.thoughtco.com/rye-the-domestication-
| history-4092...
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| I learned this from my brother when I was harvesting
| Job's Tears in the garden. A bunch of foxtail seeds kept
| landing in the bowl, and looked just about big enough to
| be a grain - I commented that it seemed likely that some
| of our grains must have evolved that way, getting
| selected because they got harder to distinguish from the
| main plant. He was like "yeah... that's basically the
| story of Rye" lol. It was something I'd never thought
| about, but actually trying to harvest a grain made it
| really clear.
| bergenty wrote:
| I don't think there is anything a plant can realistically do to
| adapt to a high enough wattage laser burning it away in the
| seedling stage.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| - mimicry?
|
| - going invisible?
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Would be very very difficult for most weeds to mimic most
| crop plants. Plants can not become invisible.
| bergenty wrote:
| Hmm very good points.
| geraneum wrote:
| It's natural selection and perhaps it's more likely that they
| will go extinct in such a scenario.
| cwkoss wrote:
| There is a plant that mimics the shapes of other leaves - even
| if the leaves are made out of plastic. Pretty fascinating, the
| same photoreceptors suspected to enable this have been found in
| other plants, but the others don't use it to engage in mimicry.
|
| Weeds adapting to look like non-weeds is highly plausible, IMO.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/#:~:tex...
| .
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| > Weeds adapting to look like non-weeds is highly plausible,
| IMO.
|
| It's not highly plausible. It would take a lot of generations
| and a lot of mutations for this to happen.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Boquila trifoliolata can do it within a single generation.
| Most weeds don't have this capability currently, but a
| strong selective pressure could make it happen pretty quick
| with the right lucky mutations.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| No strong selective pressure could not make it happen
| "pretty quick" it's very complicated behavior that would
| take a very long time to appear
| StreamBright wrote:
| Finally something that gives us the hope that we can use
| technology the right way.
| curiousgeorgio wrote:
| It's cool technology, but let's be careful here. If we've learned
| anything about technology in the past few years, it's that the
| benefits usually come with a host of new problems.
|
| Cars, phones, and many critical pieces of infrastructure are
| quickly becoming impossible to service or fix by anyone but their
| manufacturers. Even normal operation relies on services that can
| be shut down which the flip of a remote switch. Not a huge
| problem in the individual case, but when our farming relies on
| similar technology, threats like cyberattacks, bugs, datacenter
| outages, chip supply issues, political disagreements, etc all
| become major national threats _really quickly_. Granted, farming
| has had sophisticated technology for quite a few years now, but
| smarter AI systems will inevitably involve more interaction with
| cloud services, and at that point, we 're setting ourselves up
| for some scary possibilities.
| everyplant35 wrote:
| FarmWise is another company in the space. Their machines offer a
| targeted cultivation for crops like lettuce, broccoli and
| cauliflower. See the performance of the system below:
|
| https://youtu.be/vtM_oSiuxeM
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| computerdork wrote:
| This is an incredible idea and as others have mentioned below,
| there are other companies with products like this. In fact, John
| Deere released an AI controlled pesticide sprayer a little while
| back. It's supposed to be _amazing_ :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEbjcqIuvi0
| https://www.deere.com/en/sprayers/see-spray-ultimate/
|
| But, am sure having multiple players in the market is a good
| idea. Yeah, John Deere is obviously a behemoth and may not be as
| light a nimble as a good startup in advancing this tech! (and
| hopefully, they wont try to squash out the competition).
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > John Deere
|
| > pesticide sprayer
|
| Says all about the company.
| CardenB wrote:
| The sprayer significantly reduces the amount of pesticide
| needed. It's not crop dusting, it's precision spraying.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| With chemicals, killing insects, pollution creation and
| everything else outright environmental dangerous.
|
| Lasers are a MUCH better option. John Deere is not a
| reputable company when it comes to farming.
| fbn79 wrote:
| I;m curios how much the AI affect the chemicals usage. I mean,
| from the video looks like the less chemicals comes mainly from
| the jet spray system. The AI could limit the jet spray zone, but
| how much? Is the game worth the candle?
| KaiserPro wrote:
| The AI is just object recognition. Its not rocket science
| anymore.
|
| Because you can now identify the weed's location to within
| 15mm, (down from >5meters) you can use much smaller, moveable
| sprayers to apply the chemical, rather than just spraying the
| entire field.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| mfiguiere wrote:
| Mindblowing that it geo-locates and stores the centimeter scale
| position of the 4M plants of a farm!
| propogandist wrote:
| this is likely the SaaS part of the operation, in addition to
| the large CapEx to get the equipment setup.
| hzhou321 wrote:
| Nice! If the robots can sustain on solar energy, even better.
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| That would be great, but I don't think we'll have batteries
| that can power a tractor for more than a short time on rough
| and soft terrain anytime soon.
| [deleted]
| travisgriggs wrote:
| The video paid a nice compliment to the "modern farmers." It's
| the right thing to say in the video.
|
| But I've worked with tech in ag for 10+ years now. There are some
| motivated/excited early adopters. But there is still a lot of
| resistance. It generally feels 10-20 years behind. I've worked
| quite a bit with the very company mentioned in the video. Like
| any big company, it's made up of all kinds. I'll leave it at
| that.
| [deleted]
| pxue wrote:
| Just waiting for the day when the robot decides we are also a
| weed.
| sbf501 wrote:
| I expected farm-pest-control robots to look more like the ones in
| the film "Runaway" (1984) than a big laser turret you drag over a
| field.
| pmarreck wrote:
| wouldn't it be easier/cheaper to just enclose the whole field in
| a giant greenhouse with a 100% controllable environment? I mean,
| I hear many crops are lost every year to things like floods from
| rainstorms that require pricey insurance coverage, the idea of
| having a guaranteed crop every year with no unauthorized
| organisms and perfect lighting and watering and nutrition seems
| like it would eventually more than make up for the initial
| construction cost of a giant greenhouse
| tomcam wrote:
| Far too expensive and not remotely close to doable. Greenhouse
| environments are actually pretty difficult to control. They are
| very much prone to ventilation problems, pests, mold, and
| fungi.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| How on earth would that be easier. Do you know how expensive
| greenhouses are?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Weeds are the enemy /s
|
| But really, the whole idea of having perfectly manicured fields
| like that with no sign of any weeds around seems like the real
| problem to me.
|
| Zero biodiversity...we wonder where the insects are going ?
| nemo wrote:
| On the one hand, the reason for the decline of the various
| milkweed butterflies appears largely to be a result of areas
| that once supported some milkweed populations were hit with
| glyphosate which killed the host plants off at a massive scale.
| On the other hand this is already happening with chemicals
| sprayed indiscriminately, this reduces the amount that's
| sprayed, which could save farmers money, and this reduces
| glyphosate runoff which is good. Still seems to have the down
| side that if actually adopted would likely cause even more loss
| since it could be used on crops where it's avoided now. And no
| farmer is going to program it to skip milkweed or some other
| important host plants, they hate milkweed.
| thwieruo23434 wrote:
| I'm not surprised you're being downvoted. Us lot in India think
| the occidental culture is inherently mono-cultural; even with
| all the DEI stuff, all that is being fostered is phenotypic
| diversity (the most useless type).
|
| Classical India seems to have had better ways. In an
| introduction to Dharampal's works (who has written a lot of
| science in pre-Modern India), Claude Alvares notes how the
| Dutch, who had reduced the grass species to one or two in their
| land, had the temerity to advise India, where each backyard
| has(d) hundreds of species of plant.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B27IBNotwpE
|
| Pity, everything in India too is rapidly devolving to Anglo-
| American monoculture now :( They (the elites, who are the ones
| that really count) barely even speak their own languages now.
| temptemptemp111 wrote:
| abstractbill wrote:
| As the video points out (toward the end), since these robots
| recognize and work on each individual plant, they are much more
| able to deal with more biodiversity than our current methods,
| which can only scale for monocrops.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Would be super cool to have an autonomous robot that could
| get a 'kill list' and destroy every invasive plant in an area
| while leaving everything else unharmed.
|
| Could be a fantastic diversity-enabling tool.
| throwaway0x7E6 wrote:
| >Weeds are the enemy
|
| Yes.
|
| >Zero biodiversity
|
| Good.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Careful usage of cover crops and planting companion plants
| would be the opposite of that kind of approach. Companion
| plants will to some degree prevent weeds, generally without
| competing for the same nutrients as the crop. Usually they're
| selected based on their ability to attract beneficial insects
| as well, which function as a form of pest control. This is
| really only viable at the scale of gardening, but when used
| effectively, can produce much higher per-area yields.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| Having worked a farm for a few summers, my understanding is
| that we're dealing with the following set of tradeoffs.
|
| 1. If you allow weeds, you'll need to till the soil to maintain
| yields
|
| 2. If you till the soil you erode it, damaging the the long
| term health of your farm and water supplies.
|
| 3. If you drop yields globally, people starve (and farmers go
| out of business)
|
| Since eroding the soil harms biodiversity in a different set of
| ways, killing weeds seems like the least bad option. Ideally we
| wouldn't require harsh chemicals to do that but no one has
| quite figured it out.
| justinator wrote:
| Maybe it's monocrops that are problematic.
| sidibe wrote:
| I'm not saying either of you are wrong but the we'll be
| needing the robots to do it other ways or 10x as many
| farmers. It takes a ton of labor to deal with weeds and other
| issues in a more sustainable way
| bamboozled wrote:
| So I understand this is not realistic currently; However
| where I currently reside, basically everybody grows their
| own food, and has plenty of time to be doing other things
| in the meantime.
|
| So while we all need robots, there are probably a hell of a
| lot of people who would be able to produce even one crop a
| year in their backyard, who don't bother.
| jollyllama wrote:
| We would probably all be much healthier if instead of
| indirectly subsidizing make-work desk jobs, organic
| vegetable gardening was subsidized instead.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| That would be bad. We would require much more area for
| the same output.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Gardening would have a higher yield per area than
| farming. The amount of area needed would decrease. Labor
| needed would increase.
| bluGill wrote:
| Not really. Gardening the typical garden crops do - but
| those are high labor which is why we garden them. You
| could plant wheat in your garden it would be more labor,
| but your yields would probably be less, or if you are
| really good the same.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Most people would be much healthier consuming less
| soybeans and corn syrup and more garden vegetables.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| Actually we would be better consuming more soybeans. Most
| of it goes to animal feed.
| tracker1 wrote:
| No reason the robots won't reach "other ways" at a point
| either. I think it will take a lot of combinations of
| solutions over time.
|
| I still think there should be a lot more rotation between
| general crops, animal grazing and replenishment cycles.
| "Live" soil is becoming a problem and we keep
| extracting/killing it faster than it's getting replenished.
| Not to mention all the pesticide issues.
| zwieback wrote:
| There's _" no sign of any weeds/zero biodiversity"_ and then
| there's "target the weeds that would crowd out your crop",
| which is definitely a problem in my raised beds.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| If you think most current conventional fields have weeds i've
| got really bad news.
| stubish wrote:
| If non-productive plants and insects are mixed in, you will
| need more farmland to produce the same amount of crops. In the
| bigger picture it would be counter productive.
| blockwriter wrote:
| I picked up grains from a farm in Dwight, Illinois that makes
| very limited use of herbicides and pesticides (it seems like
| oats are all but impossible to grow economically without some
| use of a weed killing agent). The farmer made the transition
| for his health and the health of his kids, because he was
| intuiting that certain health problems were the result of
| agricultural chemicals. I was struck, walking in their corn
| field, by the abundance of insects and weeds, and the absence
| of these quantities in standard ag corn fields struck me as
| alarming.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| There is a very good reason why the remove weeds. It
| decreases yeilds and increases contamination by a lot
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| No sarcasm, it's true. Most insects are the enemy too.
|
| The philosophy behind modern industrial farming is to basically
| create a chemical holocaust that extinguishes all plant,
| animal, and fungal life except the crop.
| abledon wrote:
| I'd love to work in this industry as a developer... coming from
| web/cloud what would the average interview be like? Is it more
| leetcode style? or system design? I would only want intermediate
| developer position at most for starters. What are some projects
| that would make someone stand out for AgTech Robotics stuff?
| zmix wrote:
| > What are some projects that would make someone stand out for
| AgTech Robotics stuff?
|
| I guess, in addition to the typical engineering stuff (AI,
| robotics, etc.) to work with these companies on startup-level,
| a passion for agriculture, especially historical agriculture,
| might be what could set you apart from competition.
| defrost wrote:
| Vision, statistics, flight | ground control, etc.
|
| Eg: A chap I work with has tens of thousands of ANOVA grow
| plots for seed varieties spread across Western Australian
| Climatic conditions .. he and various assistants routinely fly
| multispectral camera drones above plot areas and calibration
| images.
|
| That's an aquisition, store, normalise, process cycle for a
| fairly steady data stream.
| melony wrote:
| Getting in (assuming a typical robotics company/startup) is not
| that hard, just don't expect to get paid much (relative to most
| top tier tech compensation). Most of these "fun" fields all
| either significantly underpay, or are part of subsidiaries like
| Google X that are next to impossible to get in without
| exceptional pedigree.
| eschneider wrote:
| I interviewed with a few companies in that space last year and
| they were pretty much standard interviews. Some coding tests,
| take home projects, the usual stuff. If it looks interesting to
| you, definitely give it a shot.
| discordance wrote:
| Ag needs crud too
| modeless wrote:
| Seems like it should hoe each weed instead of spraying it. I
| guess that's a little harder to do. Maybe a lot harder.
|
| Two other things I thought were interesting in the video. One,
| the idea of mapping the whole field is pretty cool. There must be
| useful things you could do with a millimeter-scale 3D map of an
| entire field. Two, this is happening in California, just a few
| hours' drive from Silicon Valley. I hope some of the engineers
| laid off recently find work in ag tech, because there will be
| huge opportunities coming with the rise of computer vision and
| (hopefully soon) robotics.
| illys wrote:
| I saw on one of the illustrations that the spray is made of
| acetic acid. Pretty natural product, aka vinegar at low
| concentration.
|
| Well targeted as they seem to do, I guess it is a good product
| to preserve the soil and wanted plants with no harmful
| residues.
| bluGill wrote:
| Vinegar is more toxic to humans than roundup. And you need a
| lot more of it to be effective.
| illys wrote:
| Could you develop? Kind of toxicity? As traces in food?
| Source?
|
| I put vinegar in my salad sauce, I would not dare with
| glyphosate.
| bluGill wrote:
| Check the SDS for details, you can easily goggle it,
| though reading them is harder. You put dilute vinegar on
| your salad. You don't do that for glyphosate because it
| doesn't add any flavor, but if you put as much on your
| salad as you do vinegar it would harmless.
| modeless wrote:
| That's cool, yeah, precise targeting should remove the need
| for highly toxic herbicide.
| parineum wrote:
| That seems opposite to me. Precise targeting would allow
| the use of highly toxic herbicides in minute quantities.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Do the least harm possible!
| modeless wrote:
| The reason herbicides have to be highly toxic is that
| they are sprayed indiscriminately, so only small
| quantities actually get on the target. Farmers don't
| _prefer_ highly toxic things. They would prefer to use
| less toxic things, applied directly in large quantities
| to the target and not elsewhere.
| esperent wrote:
| > I saw on one of the illustrations that the spray is made of
| acetic acid.
|
| The cynic in me wants to point out that this is basically a
| commerce, so of course they use the best sounding chemical
| possible. Will they still use that by the time it becomes a
| commercial product? I guess only time will tell.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| That's really cool, so glad to hear it!
|
| I wonder about the effects of acidification after long term
| use. Perhaps some alkaline filler can be added to balance.
| aerophilic wrote:
| For tilling to kill weeds, there actually is one that does
| that, Farmwise[0].
|
| The challenge with Agtech robots in general is that you need to
| be able to prove payback, including all operations costs, in
| ideally 12 months or less on equipment.
|
| This is very hard for most crops because you have to be
| constantly moving from field to field. However, it is doable
| and I see it happening soon, starting in specific crops (My
| company L5 [1] is working this for strawberries).
|
| However, as the price of raw tech inputs (robot arms, compute,
| cameras) continue to fall, I do see lots of "low hanging fruit"
| that can be won relatively soon, especially with smart
| software.
|
| [0] https://farmwise.io/ [1] https://www.l5automation.com/
| dhx wrote:
| I'm glad you mentioned the economics of automating farms.
| There are numerous products listed in this thread that only
| appear to target one crop type and only perform one low cost
| activity (spraying, weeding, etc) that is done once per
| growing season (and often once per year).
|
| Automation of day-neutral strawberry picking sounded sensible
| on first glance to me because harvest occurs over many months
| of a year (extendable by transporting the robots to another
| region with different growing seasons) thus robots are not
| sitting around idle for 95% of the year. Additionally,
| harvesting strawberries is dangerous work for humans to
| perform due to repetitive twisting, bending and reaching.
|
| However, looking deeper into the economics of strawberries
| (using Australia as an example), picking costs are stated to
| only be 20% of fixed growing costs[1] seemingly amounting to
| AUD$1.30/plant (USD$0.80-1.00/plant). With a typical density
| of 40000 plants/hectare, robots appear to only be cost
| neutral if they can be operated at AUD$52000/hectare
| (USD$30000-40000/hectare) for picking. This results in, for
| example, two AUD$26000/year (USD$15000-20000/year) robots
| assigned per hectare needing to pick at a rate of 2 seconds
| per plant[2] for 12 hours each every day. With 9 million tons
| of strawberries produced globally per year, the strawberry
| harvesting market would be AUD$11bn if Australian labour
| rates, likely amongst the highest, were the global norm.
|
| Would it be fair to say that farm automation will only become
| viable if everyone accepts the true cost of growing produce
| is much higher than current prices. That, for example, wages
| for farm workers would need to be much higher (doubled or
| more) to be livable wages and also to compensate for injuries
| and health risks of farm work and an inability to work in
| manual labour jobs at older age. In Australia we're seeing
| many news articles on the topic of "lack of farm workers" so
| a significant upwards movement in farm worker wages seems
| possible. Or perhaps strict health and safety regulations
| introduced to protect farm workers from repetitive injuries
| would result in wide adoption of farm robotics? Or perhaps it
| will just be cheap robotics that results in mass uptake of
| farm robotics?.
|
| [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-06-25/breakdown-
| of-th...
|
| [2] Per a 2019 example from one of your competitors
| (https://youtu.be/9cxHYEzMVKQ?t=106) it looks very difficult
| to pick at a rate of 2 seconds per plant without wastage
| (e.g. missing obscured berries) but my simple calculations
| are nonetheless optimistic.
| Wahash-Hominid wrote:
| Sydney based startup Agerris was doing mechanical weeding 2
| years ago. Unfortunately they went under about a year ago. You
| can see their platform in action here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7FAtgZBzk
| esperent wrote:
| > Seems like it should hoe each weed instead of spraying it.
|
| Huh, I actually thought it was using a laser and the 95%
| chemicals meant through the entire farming process. In that
| case it's probably much less than 95% chemical use overall,
| there's still pesticides and fertilizer to consider, not to
| mention chemicals used in cleaning and packaging.
|
| I wonder what kind of power you'd need to laser weeds at that
| speed? Now that I think about it, probably like, a lot. And
| maybe it'd heat up the surrounding plants too much.
|
| Spraying with that much accuracy is still pretty cool though.
| hydrox24 wrote:
| Australia's CSIRO has a setup out at Boorowa[0] doing this kind
| of work. They're doing a lot of traditional research into
| monitoring and modelling technology, but also doing some neat
| digital twin style projects.
|
| [0]: https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-
| us/industries/agriculture/...
| ajpgrealish wrote:
| Small Robot Company have a robot called Dick which uses "Non-
| Chemical Weeding", i.e. they zap the weed to kill it, and it's
| root. They use other small robots to do the mapping and
| planting. I really like the idea of small, specialised robots
| for different tasks.
|
| https://www.smallrobotcompany.com/weed-killing
| busyant wrote:
| > I really like the idea of small, specialised robots for
| different tasks
|
| in my experience, this is the best approach. I worked at a
| few biotechs that did a lot of lab automation.
|
| the robots that could do everything were hardly ever used
| because they did everything poorly and seemed to be
| constantly in need of repair.
|
| the robots that could do one simple job were always in use.
| modeless wrote:
| The text "to take place in early 2020" and "AVAILABLE 2021"
| on that site, in November 2022, does not inspire confidence.
|
| I guess in the near term dozens of specialized robots for
| each task will be necessary, but the idea I like is teams of
| general purpose robots using simple tools to perform almost
| any task "manually". It's too early to implement that now,
| but I think it will be feasible within my lifetime.
|
| Generality is probably one reason why this robot sprays
| instead of hoeing. In addition to killing weeds, by changing
| chemicals this thing can fertilize, and they also mention
| pollinating and preventing pollination of flowers.
| (Preventing pollination avoids overburdening some kinds of
| trees. Currently instead people have to do "thinning" which
| is simply pulling half of the crop off the tree before it's
| ripe and throwing it on the ground).
| danielheath wrote:
| Weed zapping is fascinating - but putting the kind of power
| electronics required to deliver sufficient voltage in a
| mobile robot is _terrifying_ from an OHSA perspective.
|
| One group I'm familiar with are using 50kv (and "more than
| enough" amps) for the purpose.
| taberiand wrote:
| Maybe this is a false equivalence, but I think industrial
| scale leaching of poisons into the water supply is more
| terrifying and anything that can replace that is worth
| looking into.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I see no problem equipping a killer robot with lethal
| electricity and an AI guidance. It's basically the same as
| Tesla autopilot beta, no?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If there is nobody around when it's powered on, I don't see
| a problem.
|
| If people have to stay around to care for it, then yes,
| it's scary.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Farming machines are already rather deadly. They are big,
| have cutting implements... So it probably wouldn't change
| that much.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's not really. Plenty of people have handheld tasers
| powered by 9v batteries and plenty of farm equipment can
| (and does) mangle people not being careful around very
| dangerous machines.
|
| This is just a misunderstanding of the risks involved in
| various things.
| modeless wrote:
| Yeah there are tons of really dangerous things on farms,
| like Paraquat, or power take-offs. Power doesn't have to
| be electrical to kill you. Mechanical power will do the
| job just fine.
| danielheath wrote:
| I'm well aware that it's far from the only thing that'll
| kill me on a farm.
|
| That said, comparing a 50Kv shock to a handheld taser
| (which typically run at 300-500v) makes me think I might
| not be the one who misunderstands the risks.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >(which typically run at 300-500v)
|
| You're off by three orders of magnitude. You need about
| 32 million volts per meter to overcome the resistance of
| the air. For a gap of a centimeter, it's about a few
| hundred kilovolts.
|
| And I grew up farming, I'm quite familiar with the
| dangers.
|
| For example harvesting equipment... the big ones are sort
| of up to a 30 food wide chainsaw with conveyors and other
| grabby bits to suck you in. People need to be many meters
| away from those things while they're running for any
| sense of safety. A hot spark has nothing on many other
| dangers and if designed with any sense would only result
| in severe local burns. Plenty of farm equipment will
| effortlessly rip a limb off if it doesn't tear your
| entire body into bite sized chunks.
|
| You know the machines that do that and you don't go near
| them. When you're the operator you must know where
| everyone is at all times and know what they mean to do...
| and be able to communicate with them with a series of
| gestures, eye contact, short yells, etc. If you don't
| it's trivially easy to kill your helpers.
| wfme wrote:
| That 300-500v number is off by about 100x. A handheld
| taser typically runs at around 20,000 to 150,000 volts.
| This site lists a few alongside their voltage
| https://www.thehomesecuritysuperstore.com/blogs/the-home-
| sec...
| ilyt wrote:
| Go and see how combine looks and tell me you think
| otherwise farm machinery is very safe when used wrong.
| crorella wrote:
| This is very interesting, as a Data Eng, I'd love to see what
| they are doing with the huge volume of data they collect.
| bjt2n3904 wrote:
| Taking the ideas of big tech, and applying them to a low tech
| area is sure to make things better. /s
|
| The tool used to be a pipe and wheels. Now the tool is a five
| figure contraption with millions of lines of code, hundreds of
| moving parts, and extremely specific high tech things that aren't
| easy to replace.
|
| People are drunk on high tech, and have forgotten that simple is
| good.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| No mention of biological control and using insects as robots
| here? That's fine.
| chatterhead wrote:
| Would very much like to see this kind of tech miniaturized for
| the use in homesteading. Would be nice to have autonomous
| cultivation at home. Would make having a lawn useful again.
| Animats wrote:
| "Never been done before, in any field?" Er, no.
|
| * John Deere, has "See and spray".
|
| * Robovator
|
| * Carbon Robotics Laser Weeder
|
| * Ecorobotics solar powered autonomous weeder.
|
| Your choice of chemical, laser, or mechanical weed killing. The
| first two above are production products.
| krypty28 wrote:
| It's spelled Ecorobotix (I work there :-)). We have two
| machines, ARA a mounted-sprayer and AVO the solar powered
| autonomous weeder you are talking about.
|
| https://ecorobotix.com/en/
|
| Ask me anything ;-)
| Mistletoe wrote:
| What herbicides do you spray?
|
| How much will Avo cost?
| moffkalast wrote:
| Anything? :D What does your stack look like? Do you use ROS
| or something more in-house?
| krypty28 wrote:
| something more in-house, mostly in C++.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| It's funny too look at the difference between the "See and
| spray" demonstration video and the "Robovator" video. The "See
| and spray" video feels very corporate, with lots of 3D renders
| and piano music and marketing actors making awkward jokes. The
| "Robovator" video is to the point, only shows on-the-field live
| videos, with no music and barely any flourish, to the point of
| being incredibly dry.
|
| I wonder which one would work best on farmers. The corporate
| one feels more polished, but the simpler one feels more honest.
| Jolliness7501 wrote:
| Chemicals? Do you mean dihydrogen monoxide? Horible stuff.
| Increase your cancer risc like from 0% to a 100%.
| a_t48 wrote:
| I worked with the founders of this company, sharp guys. Glad to
| see they are doing well.
| [deleted]
| battery_glasses wrote:
| When I see stuff like this sometimes I get depressed that I'm
| building apps that just move little bits of information around
| the web and don't have any real demonstrable value to the world.
|
| How hard is the jump into the realm of computer
| vision/AI/robotics for someone with strong skills and experience
| building web applications? Is the coding much different? Is a
| company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to develop
| new types of AI or are they working higher up the stack and just
| need people who can pipe data around?
| krosaen wrote:
| Creator of Django did an ML project last year and has a lot of
| good insights - general web / programming know-how is really
| useful for building custom tooling to manage / observe datasets
| and things like that.
|
| edit: forgot to include link :)
|
| http://www.holovaty.com/writing/machine-learning-thoughts/
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Positions do all of the above exist. Just depends on the
| company and where in the stack you are. There's a lot of math
| and domain expertise on the controls and sensors sides. Most
| people in any particular company aren't doing those though.
| There are lots of jobs available for c/c++/Matlab/Python/js.
|
| If you don't want to change what you're doing or using, most
| modern robotic platforms have a web interface somewhere in them
| for monitoring the fleet. Any web developer would find their
| skills perfectly compatible.
| donkeyd wrote:
| I work at a company doing smart stuff with computers (which
| some would consider AI) that helps with, among others, the
| energy transition and getting people across the world
| broadband. Only about 2 out of 20 devs are actually working on
| the complicated algorithms. The others are working on the stuff
| you need to build around it to allow people to actually use the
| algos. On top of the algos is a pretty complicated web app,
| which takes most of the actual development time.
|
| So you won't actually have to jump into a whole new career in
| order to contribute to these types of products. You just have
| to search for a company that works on a challenge you want to
| contribute to.
| csomar wrote:
| > How hard is the jump into the realm of computer
| vision/AI/robotics for someone with strong skills and
| experience building web applications?
|
| If you are willing to make the jump. It's possible. You have an
| advantage.
|
| > Is the coding much different?
|
| Not as much as they have marketed you to believe.
|
| > Is a company like this employing math/theroy-heavy people to
| develop new types of AI or are they working higher up the stack
| and just need people who can pipe data around?
|
| No. They are not making academic thesis. You'd be surprised how
| primitive and "basic" many of these companies are (comparing to
| their marketing videos, which are click/eye baits). You can
| definitively make a difference there.
|
| Of course, as other comments have mentioned, these companies
| still need front-end, databases, backend, and you know, normal
| basic automation scripts like everyone else.
| rubicon33 wrote:
| I would second this with some anecdata...
|
| I have worked for one of these companies that produces fancy
| AI based hardware.
|
| Turns out the hardware is made in China and the AI is handled
| by third parties (amazon, etc.)
|
| Does that mean putting it all together is trivial? Of course
| not. But it's not as difficult as it might seem from the
| outside.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| being the middle man is fun tho. other people do the hard
| stuff and then you get to combine it into something
| actually useful!
| rubicon33 wrote:
| Absolutely. And, a ton of valuable tools can be made.
| Make no mistake about it!
| thunfischtoast wrote:
| It's very much possible, the range of skills needed to deploy
| actual ML-driven applications ranges from web developers, data
| engineers, ML engineers, Ops guys to data scientists, so pick
| what you like.
|
| Then again: Speaking from experience, most uses cases for ML
| are not fancy, world-saving new approaches like the one in the
| video but revolve around quite mundane applications and tasks
| like "how to make users click on this add", "how much will we
| sell next month", "can we automate the creation of thix Excel-
| file" etc., so pick your company carefully
| asp_hornet wrote:
| good engineers and good companies both know good engineering
| skills transcend technology and domain. switching is very much
| possible.
| amacneil wrote:
| It's a common misconception that you need a ML or robotics PhD
| to work in the field. There are plenty of frontend & backend
| web engineering, data engineering, and infrastructure/devops
| roles available at robotics companies - you don't need to be a
| domain expert.
|
| For example, at Foxglove[0] we are building open source web-
| based visualization and data management for robotics (shameless
| plug: currently hiring).
|
| [0] https://foxglove.dev/
| pabs3 wrote:
| You might want to post your open positions on FOSSjobs and or
| add your company to the wiki:
|
| https://www.fossjobs.net/
| https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources
| thebruce87m wrote:
| I work in the embedded field, and have literally done the same
| application as the video.
|
| We have a mixed team, including mechanical engineers, web
| developers, electronics guys, embedded software guys.
|
| We do have ML people for custom networks but most of it is
| object detection/ classification which is a solved path and
| just needs data management.
|
| We've done lots of cool ML applications, but many of them need
| management systems too so that's where web apps come in.
|
| You could definitely fill a position in a small company like
| mine and upskill / sideskill in time.
|
| We're based in Scotland but do have remote workers in other
| countries.
| joshvm wrote:
| Robotics is a big field and encompasses a huge range of things.
| Similarly a lot of computer vision is pretty technical,
| particularly for robotics applications. Have a look at ROS and
| play around, you can simulate a lot of stuff. I'd also suggest
| Nvidia's Jetbot but the chip shortage has killed it.
|
| AI-wise, nowadays model training stacks are practically
| codeless. Training a state of the art model on custom data
| usually boils down to changing some parameters in a config
| file, plus some boilerplate code. Not always that easy of
| course, but training an image classifier today can be a single
| line of Python.
|
| It's not so much piping data around but dealing with datasets
| in any kind of non-trivial problem is where the hard work is.
| Neural nets are just another tool for most data scientists. For
| example exploring Kaggle will get you familiar with weird
| datasets, but actually collecting, arranging for data to be
| labelled, and then cleaning it is a skill on its own.
|
| That's usually where experience comes in. Hence there are a lot
| of startups charging frankly obscene amounts of money for data
| labelling and curation tools.
| z9znz wrote:
| Technically this is very cool. But it is ultimately trying to
| improve a horse and buggy rather than developing a spacecraft.
|
| The future will be something like, or at least based on, vertical
| self-contained (almost completely closed systems) automated
| farms.
|
| The best hope we have for solving food needs AND climate problems
| is to let as much earth as possible go wild, and reduce and
| optimize our footprint. Actually that's not correct - the best
| hope we have is to allow human population growth to go negative
| and also do smarter things.
| krzat wrote:
| Plants need energy to grow, and the easiest way of providing
| that energy is direct sunlight. Which means that vertical won't
| work too well.
|
| I suppose if you wanted be really space efficient, you could
| use nuclear energy to cultivate yeast.
| z9znz wrote:
| In much of the developed world, solar energy doesn't come
| from directly above, it comes from a much lower angle.
| Trapezoidal shaped buildings can collect a great deal of
| direct sunlight. And further, with reflectors it's possible
| to direct and concentrate this where it is most needed.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Unless you can recreate the astonishing diversity of of a
| regular ecosystem in a box, I don't want this spacecraft.
|
| Fruits and vegetable taste is already steadily decreasing and I
| have more and more trouble sourcing something decent despite
| having way more budget.
|
| I also assume that, like everything with complex systems, we
| are missing the forest for the tree and we will discover tons
| of health issues related to this in the future.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > But it is ultimately trying to improve a horse and buggy
| rather than developing a spacecraft.
|
| First, you're underselling it. 95% less pesticides is huge. If
| that's economically viable we're a LOT better off. I have my
| doubts since it's clearly a PR video, but still.
|
| Secondly, the analogy falls short. The goal of horses and cars
| is transportation of goods and people, which is easy to measure
| and cost. Agriculture is about utilizing immensely complicated
| biological systems to deliver nutrition to people. We don't
| know everything about nutrition, let alone everything that
| contributes to making nutritious food. That's why we always
| look for minimal modifications to biological systems in order
| to tweak it to our liking. The same is true for say medicine;
| we don't design an artificial organ if we can avoid it, we
| usually aim for something like a simple chemical compound that
| triggers an existing response that helps the organ function
| normally, as defined by our existing biology. We may be quite
| advanced species, but biology is not exactly something we
| master.
|
| > vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems)
|
| Well, sounds more convenient for humans, that's true. But if
| you take nutrition out of the system you have to replace it
| with something, which I don't think we've figured out.
| z9znz wrote:
| Reducing pesticide use is a big deal. But that is a small
| issue compared to the bigger problem, which as you point out
| is nutrition.
|
| Crop densities have been increasing dramatically over the
| last few decades, well beyond what natural soil systems can
| handle. Consequently, fertilizer use has increased
| dramatically. Our soils are just nearly dead as the factory
| monoculture farming has sucked everything out that it can
| (and killed a lot of important things it needed).
|
| This current advancement (TFA) is just a bandaid, or paving a
| crack in the road. Perhaps a better analogy is that this is
| paving a crack in the road when we should be designing a
| whole new transportation system to meet our current and
| future needs.
|
| Most of this agriculture is owned by a few huge companies.
| They are not interested in large systemic changes as those
| cost capital. They would much rather optimize what they have,
| even if the cliff is visible in the distance. Beyond one
| earnings quarter or perhaps a CEO's tenure, they don't care.
| As long as they are not standing on the cliff today, you
| cannot expect real (beneficial) changes.
|
| As for replacing nutrition, this needs more research. But
| there are aquaponic systems which seem promising and enable a
| much more closed loop with vastly less waste.
|
| Oh speaking of waste, I didn't even mention water yet.
| Current farming systems use water like it will never go away
| (and is free), but we know it's a problem now and presents
| its own absolute cliff in the near future.
| tim333 wrote:
| I'm not convinced vertical systems will every be very economic.
| It's much cheaper to just stick some seeds in a field than
| build some high tech building. Re letting the earth go wild,
| replacing regular meat with artificial would go a long way - a
| lot of the land is used to feed animals we eat.
| z9znz wrote:
| You can't just stick seeds in a field if you lack water or
| your soil is already dead from overfarming. These are issues
| we face already, and they are only getting worse.
|
| The water shortages are going to be our first impasse,
| because there's no remedy. Current farming uses vast amounts
| of water, much of which leaves the area due to evaporation.
| This leads to rapid desertification of regions, and then
| traditional farming becomes absolutely impossible (without
| lengthy restoration beforehand).
|
| Reducing meat consumption definitely makes the problems less
| immediate, but so far it doesn't seem like we will be able to
| reduce that consumption. So I wouldn't count this as any near
| term solution.
| tim333 wrote:
| Well, traditional farming's gone on for thousands of years.
| The water goes to the sea, comes back as rain and things go
| on. I'm not convinced there's much of a crisis overall.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > The future will be something like, or at least based on,
| vertical self-contained (almost completely closed systems)
| automated farms.
|
| nope.
|
| because vertical farms require a fucktonne of power and
| infrastructure. Moreover they are only really useful for
| certain types of crops (ie salad)
|
| Your stables (rice, cereals and root crops) don't work well in
| vertical farms.
|
| What you're actually trying to make is a greenhouse, and the
| dutch have solved that pretty much already (apart from the
| massive monoculture bit)
|
| I suspect the future is actually in dense mixed crop fields. If
| tilling, cropping and tending can be automated then making sure
| a plant grows in it's allotted space become simple and cheap.
| It reduces the risk of total crop wipeout, can keep a field
| productive all year, _and_ if done properly can improve soil
| quality.
| z9znz wrote:
| If we want to talk about ideal, then the "food forest"
| concept is about as ideal as it gets. Once built, assuming
| your local climate doesn't shift radically (difficult
| assumption now), you can get a lot of edible material out of
| a relatively small space with remarkably little human
| intervention.
|
| Ideally we would work to develop food forests everywhere in
| and around our population centers. However, that's much
| harder for a multinational company to make money doing, so
| it's not going to happen. Likewise, with city land becoming
| increasingly expensive, reverting blocks or spaces to be used
| to develop food forests is not likely.
|
| Maybe our best bet is to learn how to eat money.
| [deleted]
| chillitom wrote:
| fewer ;-)
| JohnDoe124 wrote:
| Is 'chemicals' not an uncountable noun in this context though?
| It's not talking about fewer individual chemicals, just a
| smaller quantity of 'chemicals'.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Chemicals are maybe the smallest cost of agriculture. Used to be
| < $10/acre. Costs for equipment and labor >>
|
| So saving even 95% is maybe not a compelling economical argument
| to use this.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| The environmental argument is huge, though. And there must be
| some monetary value in being able to sell your product as X%
| more environmentally friendly?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| The private farmer is operating on thin margins. They are
| ecologists to be sure; their soil is their life.
|
| But no, not just to get some enviro-theatre stamp, they'll
| pay $0 for that.
|
| And there's a lot of FUD about ag chemicals. Check rivers -
| the chemical problems are downstream from cities, where an
| urban dweller can dump as much whatever on their lawn as they
| like (and they do). While ag is restricted and regulated.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| Well not quite.
|
| resistance is a massive problem, so you need to spray more.
|
| But that kills off the soil, so you need to put more fertiliser
| in.
|
| But that means you get weeds, so you need to nuke the field,
| which means the soil blows away, which means you need more
| fertiliser....
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| That's the enviro-theatre anyway.
|
| Folks in the midwest largely use no-till single-application
| processes. Which prevents weeds from even starting.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Given the computer vision component is the hard part, why stick
| with traditional pesticides? Is there any limitation stopping
| lasers from being viable?
| rbabich wrote:
| A graphic in the middle of the video suggested that the
| herbicide being used (in one particular case) was acetic acid,
| i.e. vinegar.
| tomcam wrote:
| Lasers would require massive amounts of energy for this
| application
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| The agriculture tech industry seems like a really fun and
| rewarding place to be. I can't wait to see what happens in the
| future. Would love a job like that.
| yayitswei wrote:
| Title should be "Sniper robot treats 500k plants per hour with
| 95% less chemicals". That additional word gives a lot more
| context.
| vavooom wrote:
| Fascinating use of modern computer vision techniques equipped
| with modern robotics. Challenge of course is scale and getting
| farms to integrate such features into pre-existing processes over
| time.
| thesausageking wrote:
| I'm fascinated by Freethink, the company that creates videos like
| this for tech companies. Has anyone worked with this or similar
| companies? How much does it cost and how was your experience?
|
| https://www.freethink.com/about/for-brands
| shellfishgene wrote:
| The video was a little frustrating as it never actually
| explains how the robot works...
| jdkee wrote:
| Not sure why they use chemicals instead of a mechanical hand that
| simply grasps and unroots the weed.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| It's much easier and much much faster and more effective to use
| chemicals.
| lchengify wrote:
| There's another company called Carbon Robotics that uses lasers
| instead of weedkiller.
|
| The attachment they built needed a custom cooling rig to deal
| with the dozens of lasers. Super interesting engineering going on
| with agtech.
|
| https://www.freethink.com/robots-ai/farming-robot
| chris_va wrote:
| Hm, why lasers?
|
| Seems like a phased array microwave would be cheaper, require
| no moving parts, and be able to target the root system ... and
| be less of a safety risk.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I suspect the precision wouldn't be high enough, resulting in
| a lot of dead produce?
| mastazi wrote:
| This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag",
| but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely
| different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is
| below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I
| think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is
| swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors:
|
| > Imagine, a few years down the line, applying these principles
| to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm. Not
| necessarily a big machine going through a flat field, but small
| drones tending to trees, vines, herbs, plants, pollinators and
| water features all in the location that is best for them based on
| local features. It could micromanage weeding and harvesting, but
| also composting, planting, grafting and nurturing keystone
| species and rare species while avoiding pesticide, nitrogen
| imbalance and soil compaction. A productive farm could look like
| the garden of Eden.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| I feel like what you're describing is still in the realm of sci
| fi because of limitations in robot autonomy that we have
| expected to break through many times without success. If we
| succeed with autonomous driving we will probably succeed in
| these domains as well. As well as many other domains.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Also I think maintenance of 1000 tiny drones is going to be a
| lot more difficult than that of one big tractor
| Ekaros wrote:
| Taking real life analogy of probably similar complexity
| scenario. Would you prefer to maintain 1 very big photo
| copier. Or 100 distributed desktop printers...
| ForrestN wrote:
| This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a
| failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones
| breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind
| (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal
| number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to
| figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need
| to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower
| capacity, you'd probably not notice anything, especially
| compared with 100% lower capacity.
| ajuc wrote:
| Imagine the difference between manually replacing 1
| bearing or charging 1 battery and 1000.
|
| The only reason you think it's easy is because you ignore
| the number and just imagine doing it once anyway.
| ben_w wrote:
| I'd rather replace 10,000 AAA batteries than a single
| battery that's as big as 10,000 AAA batteries.
| bluGill wrote:
| The one big battery is easier and faster - in large part
| because you can't lift that yourself so you have machines
| to do the work for you. For AAA you could design the same
| machine, but odds are you didn't.
| ben_w wrote:
| If I had to replace 10k batteries, I'd probably make (or
| buy) a machine for that too. However, even replacing 10k
| batteries by hand probably costs less in employee hours
| than a single one-off machine for either example.
|
| (40 hours / 10,000 batteries = 14.4 seconds per battery;
| USA minimum wage = $7.25/h = $290 per 40h week, about the
| same as the cheapest hydraulic lift I saw on
| machinemart.co.uk at current exchange rates, but I'm not
| a mechanic so I don't know if that would be the right
| tool for the job anyway).
|
| And of course, the same applies if we really had drone
| swarms -- anything like this would be automated, up to
| and including full disassembly of damaged units so their
| parts could be reused for new units, e.g.
| https://youtu.be/pDZdnbI0MAc
| ajuc wrote:
| Also the scaling isn't linear. A bus that transports 100
| people doesn't burn nearly as much fuel as 100 scooters.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I think the worry is that with 1,000 drones, if you have
| 10 breaking daily, that's probably a full-time job for
| someone to be repairing them, especially if they have to
| go out retrieving them.
|
| One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of
| maintenance.
| ForrestN wrote:
| I guess I don't really understand your assumptions. Why
| would 1 massive machine capable of doing all the various
| tasks of managing this farm require less maintenance than
| 1000 presumably much simpler, smaller machines? Assuming
| other things besides mobility break, I don't think
| retrieval would be much more of an issue, or that we'd
| have reason to expect the failure rate to be higher for
| each smaller, simpler drone than for the giant, super-
| complex one. To get the same work done, the behemoth
| would have to move much faster, have many more specialize
| tools and sensors all in the same rig, and would not be
| swappable for regular maintenance without pausing the
| entire workflow. Small drones could go back to base in
| shifts (again with some margin of extra drones) so that
| there are always 1000 actively working.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I did not assume the smaller drones would be simpler than
| the tractor. In fact I'd expect them to be similarly if
| not more complex.
| lstodd wrote:
| More complex for sure. If you watched the video, there's
| still a tractor. And instead of a simple plastic tank, it
| hauls a shitton of electronics.
|
| Now, the video is shot in a shiny nice weather day. Now
| imagine how would it perform if it's raining since last
| Tuesday.
| [deleted]
| elihu wrote:
| On large scales, it's more like you have a hundred big
| tractors and if one of them breaks down the whole
| operation keeps going because there are 99 big tractors
| left. The question then becomes: how much maintenance do
| you have to do per ton of food produced? A swarm of small
| robots have a lot more parts than a large tractor that
| does the same amount of work.
|
| There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm
| use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same
| result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I
| suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is
| being done.
| ForrestN wrote:
| I guess it's true that the originally propose 1000 is an
| arbitrary number, and it would take some experimentation
| and work to figure out the ideal number of robots per
| acre to optimize whatever you care about most (yield,
| power consumption, maintenance costs being obvious
| contenders). But I think it's easy to say that literally
| _one_ giant robot covering an entire edible forest is
| obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome
| than a swarm of some size.
| ilyt wrote:
| > But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant
| robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going
| to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of
| some size.
|
| Yeah, nobody suggested that we have building size
| tractors so I don't know what you're arguing.
|
| They were talking about "current farming machine sized
| ones" vs "a drone with some crap attached"
| luqtas wrote:
| and there is the problem of having too much variety on
| crops and people wanting meat, basically...
|
| farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when
| tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far
| away... because some already give reports of what went
| wrong to the central
| ilyt wrote:
| Big tractor isn't more complex than smaller machines.
| It's just bigger. So you're essentially having 1000x the
| failure rate.
|
| Big farm will also have more than one machine and the
| "downtime" will be mostly scheduled maintenance, very
| little chance of your equipment just deciding to not work
| today. In case of many smaller farms, well, you can ask
| the neighbour... from what I remember from living in
| small village with many farmers "harvest" was often few
| farms pooling their resources and doing all the fields
| together, instead of each doing their own.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| this is like the monolithic vs microservices debate and i
| love it
| defrost wrote:
| > If we succeed with autonomous driving ....
|
| 'We' have already succeeded in autonomous driving in
| agricultural and mining domains - these are much simpler,
| more tightly controlled and less liability prone than open
| highways and suburban backstreets.
|
| eg:
|
| > We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our
| Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations.
| The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central
| controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined
| GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and
| intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and
| directions of all vehicles at all times.
|
| > In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on
| average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with
| 15% lower costs - delivering clear productivity benefits.
| They also take truck operators out of harm's way, reducing
| the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
|
| - https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation
| conviencefee999 wrote:
| Ehhh really haven't. While you could argue farming is
| different due to it being more constricted, it really isn't
| and well unlike driving, this has a size constraint which
| has and likely will not be solved for in the near or
| distant future. It's complicated and might not be solvable.
| And well the current advancements while they seem nice
| aren't very useful. I know individuals who work in this
| sphere specifically and there are several problems alone
| with basic things such as sensors which are not adequate
| enough, if anyone attempts to solve this problem in the
| next decade I'd believe them to be the next theranos.
| bluGill wrote:
| Working for John Deere I can tell you that we are
| attempting to solve the problems right now. I can't speak
| for the company, but that we are working on it is public
| knowledge.
| deelowe wrote:
| Don't leave me hanging. What is the constraint that is
| unlikely to be solved?
| bluGill wrote:
| My educated guess is detecting humans/children in places
| where they shouldn't be. Sending a tractor across a field
| controlling everything is easy - tractors have been doing
| this for more than 25 years. Detecting something that
| shouldn't be there and not killing it is hard, which is
| why all tractors that do this have some form of sensor to
| ensure someone is in the tractor. There are a few other
| issues similar to the above.
|
| I work for John Deere, I can't speak for the company.
| defrost wrote:
| > And well the current advancements while they seem nice
| aren't very useful.
|
| Current advancements already allow tractors to go
| autonomously go over the bulk of the same _large_ areas
| of ground that they have for the past decade (already
| logged and recorded), graceful fallback alerts remote
| farmer to make a human decision re: tree falls, new
| rocks, unexpected gear state changes.
|
| These _are_ useful advancements in machine control.
|
| These developments have locally run in parallel with the
| above linked Rio Tinto work here in W.Australia - it's a
| pity the largest mining operation on the globe has
| imagined its work to be productive and useful and allowed
| its cost analysis to sway its thinking lacking your
| insight to the contrary.
| joshspankit wrote:
| Did you know that natural swarm dynamics completely baffled
| us up until a few years ago: How do birds communicate well
| enough to stay on a group? How do they know which direcion to
| go? How does it look like a singular consciousness is
| undulating through hundreds or thousands of individuals? We
| marvelled and were dumbfounded.
|
| But we had made it so much more complicated because we
| couldn't see the few simple rules that each of them were
| following.
|
| Honestly, I think robot swarms will be simpler than large
| singles.
| ilyt wrote:
| All the complexity in farming is in getting the view on the
| small fraction of the area and applying treatment (water,
| fertilizer, removing weeds etc) into that area.
|
| The "swarm" is meaningless there. Each node need to have
| minimum amount of sensing and computation to handle that
| job.
|
| It's also at worst "a sloped square" so there is no "swarm
| mechanic" to move around, just zigzag around the field.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _But we had made it so much more complicated because we
| couldn't see the few simple rules that each of them were
| following._
|
| I hope you don't mean "Boids" and the three-four simple
| rules, because that's just an approximation of a swarm
| behavior made _for artistic purposes_ - i.e. the result is
| supposed to pass as a flock of birds or a school of fish to
| casual onlookers (e.g. gamers, audience of a movie), and
| not to be accurate to the real thing.
| ablob wrote:
| Even if it were "Boids", I don't think it worsens the
| argument by a lot. The essence of the statement is that
| complex behavior can emerge from a simple ruleset.
|
| I'd like to add, that while individual behavior is
| difficult to predict, a general motion prediction can be
| much easier. (Think shepherds, for example)
| [deleted]
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I keep saying I want a laser on a turret that zaps cabbage
| moths, snails, japanese beetles, squash bugs. Do I _need_ it?
| No... but it would reduce my labor and losses while increasing
| profit.
|
| There's so much opportunity for improvement, but we need the
| R&D money and start-ups to be there too. Please, VCs, spend
| your money on these projects!
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Yes, the current ways of doing intensive farming are hard on
| the land and ultimately very wasteful. If you look at the
| progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical
| farming, what they have in common is that they leverage a more
| data driven approach where you simply don't need to pre-
| emptively correct problems if you can manage the environment in
| which you grow plants better. Avoiding the conditions that
| cause pests and weeds to get out control is much more efficient
| than dealing with them after things get out of control.
|
| Basically, intensive agriculture is compensating for its
| destructive nature by just brutally suppressing any
| "undesirable" growth. In nature, pests target the weaker
| plants. Basically, you stress out plants by mismanaging them
| and they are fair game for a wide range of fungi, insects, etc.
| E.g. under or over watering them, depleting the soil, etc. all
| stress plants out. If you have unhealthy soil, it's hard to
| have healthy plants growing in it.
|
| Intensive agriculture starts with disrupting the soil (by
| plowing it). This causes the soil to degrade over time and
| releases captured carbon into the atmosphere. The natural
| response is for aggressive weeds to start growing in disrupted
| soil. To "fix" this, farmers use a mix of pesticides and
| fertilizers. The pesticides kill a lot more than just the pests
| and weeds and then further degrades the soil and the bio
| diversity in and on it. And finally the fertilizer is just
| bleeding out of the land straight into the ground water and
| surrounding areas. It works but it is resource intensive. You
| need lots of water, chemicals, energy, etc to grow a single
| crop at the cost of literally anything else. Basically modern
| intensive farming grows mono cultures on top of artificially
| created deserts.
|
| Organic farming avoids doing that. Try not to disrupt the soil.
| Kill off (and compost) weaker plants rather than trying to
| rescue them. Use nature to keep pests and weeds in check. Etc.
| It works but it is more labor intensive. You need people to
| look after things. You get healthier and tastier produce (cooks
| love organically grown stuff for this reason). However,
| automating that labor makes it more scalable. That's the
| opportunity here.
| madacol wrote:
| > If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic
| farming and indoor/vertical farming
|
| By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?. I've
| heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is
| still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much
| power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other
| areas
|
| It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically
| if electricity becomes 10-100x more efficient
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I don't know what you've heard and where you've heard it
| but there is generally a lot of misinformation floating
| around and most of it is being sponsored by lobbies with an
| agenda to keep the oil and gas companies going. So, I would
| suggest not taking any of that at face value. Including
| what you hear in threads like this or from me.
|
| Vertical farms are essentially closed systems where
| nutrients, energy and some water goes in and produce comes
| out. There's a bit more to it of course but that's the
| general idea. They are climate controlled environments
| where light is provided via grow lights. In short, it uses
| energy which needs to come from somewhere.
|
| You are confusing power requirements and greenhouse gases.
| Mostly these things use some form of sustainable power.
| Either sourced indirectly via some electricity provider; or
| directly with e.g. solar panels. If you think about it, the
| number one expensive consumable here is electricity and the
| cheapest way to produce it is via renewables. It's that
| simple. Why would you get more expensive energy if you can
| get it cheaper. Keeping all those ACs, lights, pumps, etc.
| going you are going to have to figure that one out or deal
| with competition that is smarter than you on that front.
|
| There are probably a few farms that are forced to buy via
| the grid and are hopelessly dependent on their local coal
| burning monopolists. Not a great business plan but the good
| news is that coal is rapidly becoming a very unfashionable
| way to produce power due to the fact that it is expensive
| and dirty. It being expensive cuts down on energy margins
| and causes coal dependent producers to be dealing with
| awkward things like going bankrupt and being forced to pay
| more for their coal than they can charge for the resulting
| energy when wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Gas has
| similar issues, as people that pay gas bills these days can
| vouch for. Mine went up by 2x recently. Not great.
| dools wrote:
| That's what farmbot is going for
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Next up, swarms of robot bees to do the pollination:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation
| conviencefee999 wrote:
| Ironically this is actually one of the bigger problems to
| solve for in the generation and is one that has not been
| solved for.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| I don't think there's any irony in it. That's exactly why
| they were used in the show.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| This is not one of the bigger problems to solve for our
| generation. European honey bees are not going anywhere.
| conviencefee999 wrote:
| No it has more to do with creating robots at this size
| that can take and complete complex tasks not the honey
| bees.
| robotresearcher wrote:
| > the future is swarms of small robots
|
| A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy
| supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators
| have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are
| enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition
| apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply.
|
| This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants,
| termites, etc. Swarm critters rely on the emergent effects of
| lots of behavior to make up for their limited sensing and
| computation. By 'limited' I mean relative to a mammal or bird.
| Lots of behavior means lots of energy spent moving and doing:
| exactly what is prohibitively expensive for a robot.
|
| Computation and sensing is getting better, smaller and cheaper
| much faster than batteries and actuators. This trend favors
| smarter robots that think carefully (cheap) and do the right
| thing (expensive per shot).
| Haga wrote:
| EGreg wrote:
| The problem is that swarms of robots can be used for
| destructive purposes. There, the amount of energy expended
| and the loss of some drones is no match for the destruction
| caused. Not to mention all those decentralized self healing
| swarms are totally resistant to the conventional "destroy the
| Borg queen" nonsense trope of so many alien movies. (Yes I
| specifically mentioned the Borg queen because it was the
| moment Trek nerfed the Borg's greatest strength and became
| like all the other denoument alien action flick franchises)
| psychoslave wrote:
| >The problem is that swarms of robots can be used for
| destructive purposes.
|
| Well, toxic chemical agents can also be used as weapon on
| human civil, and -- sadly -- it was actually used that way.
| Plus even when you use them for farming, you still have
| pollution that will erode biodiversity, human health, and
| other sustainable environment negative impacts.
|
| Not to say that robot swarm is necessarily a perfect green
| solution. You still have to build them and feed them with
| energy, so even if the robot would be exempt of undesirable
| side effect on local operational site, the global impact
| would most likely include plants in their lifecycle.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| Yeah, instead of a swarm you could have one gigantic arm that
| can reach anywhere.
| sshine wrote:
| This could simultaneously absolve the need for autonomous
| vehicles, because whenever you need to go somewhere, you
| could just make the giant arm put you there.
| ajuc wrote:
| That's called a train. It's great. You can read a book
| while you are transported, it uses very little power to
| get you there, it can be 0 emission, there are no traffic
| jams. Sadly it's not fashionable cause you can't show off
| how wealthy you are by using it.
| dangerlibrary wrote:
| > There are no traffic jams
|
| In the US, most tracks prioritize freight traffic over
| passenger rail. And there is a tremendous amount of
| freight traffic. There may not often be traffic jams, but
| when you are diverted to side track to wait and allow a
| priority freight train through, it's not uncommon to wait
| a very long time (I've been delayed more than an hour on
| the 3 hour train ride from Portland to Seattle).
|
| There are also huge bottlenecks in US track
| infrastructure that absolutely do lead to traffic jams -
| perhaps most infamously in New York City. Vetoing the
| addition of 6 additional tracks through NYC is one of the
| reason Chris Christie was so hated.
| sshine wrote:
| I occasionally take the train because I like the
| atmosphere.
|
| In Europe, taking the train is often more expensive than
| flying.
|
| Sadly it's not fashionable because it isn't cheaper and
| takes a lot longer.
| Apanatshka wrote:
| That's because trains get taxed, while flights _still_
| get subsidised. It's maddening.
| ajuc wrote:
| It's faster than flights on short (<3 hour) routes
| because you don't have the whole security theatre thing.
| Also train stations are in the city center usually and
| airports are in the outskirts.
| psychoslave wrote:
| On more actual security concerns side, you will have a
| hard time hijacking a train and jet into the side of a
| skyscraper.
| dotancohen wrote:
| The far more common scenario - a bomb in a bag - is very
| devastating in closed spaces such as trains and buses.
| ajuc wrote:
| Nobody does it in trains/buses, cause it's much more
| efficient to do it at the train/bus station. Or any other
| place where people queue.
| dotancohen wrote:
| It's happened dozens of times in my country - I've lost
| schoolmates (not personal friends) in bus bombings.
| itronitron wrote:
| Why not both? You could have each train actually be an
| array of arms that reach out and pick people up and move
| them along their route. The arms wouldn't have to be as
| long since the train is moving along the rail, and a
| select number of arms could be reserved for first class
| passengers.
| borispavlovic wrote:
| First class wagons are used exactly for that, to show the
| wealth.
| ajuc wrote:
| Not really. I often take 1st class because 2nd class is
| full and I'd have to stand for 2 hours and the difference
| is 5-10 USD.
| ilyt wrote:
| Sure you can
|
| https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars
|
| There was even some hn post on it where someone detailed
| how much it costs and what you get
| robotresearcher wrote:
| Gigantic arms are not feasible because of how torque and
| leverage work.
|
| As your arm gets longer, it has to get stronger, thus
| heavier, thus requiring larger motors, and anchored to the
| ground better. After a handful of meters, robot arms can't
| hold themselves up, let alone carry a useful tool.
|
| There are multiple meter long robot arms for lifting big
| things in factories but they are enormous, enormously
| expensive, and consume enormous power.
|
| But here's a delightful concept that sidesteps this, by
| making the arm weigh nothing:
|
| https://youtu.be/INTHRNcyW9w
| limaoscarjuliet wrote:
| Plus maintenance on large number of things is a b*tch.
|
| My better half owns a small hotel with 19 rooms. Turns out
| running a simple 10 minutes task in each room takes... entire
| day (3 hours for the work + switch room overhead + breaks
| turns out to be full day often).
| travisgriggs wrote:
| This is spot on.
|
| I work in this industry (contributing architect of
| https://nelsonirrigation.com/products/twig-wireless-
| controls...).
|
| We dream of lots of fun things. And even try some of them.
| But not a few days go by that we don't once again mutter
| "power is king" To each other. _Everything_ we do revolves
| around the constraint of power budgets.
| peteradio wrote:
| Here's an idea, curious for some feedback:
|
| Make a square of tensioned cable (or rigid rail) boxing in
| some area of garden/food forest/farmland at a height above
| the plants. Have 4 modules which maintain position on
| opposite sides and holds a tensioned wire between them,
| making a tensioned wire along the x and a tensioned wire
| along the y. At the intersection of these wires there is a
| powered doohicky that can act like a spider and drop down
| onto the plants below and do its work. The power to the
| doohicky could be cable from either axis.
| thrwawy74 wrote:
| So... we engineer the plants to grow bigger to accommodate
| for robots that cannot be made smaller, or with denser
| battery packs :D
| dotancohen wrote:
| How about having an induction recharge state every few
| meters? They could be rolled out as the same type of
| infrastructure as water piping is now. At scale, induction
| chargers can be manufactured very inexpensively.
| ilyt wrote:
| Why ? You can just have one big tractor hauling a bunch
| of them. What does spreading it to smaller agents gain
| you ?
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| what if we make them bigger than insects but still relatively
| small? just an arm on a track. heck, we can put the energy in
| the track too. boom, no battery.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| There are some interesting things being done with pivot
| spans. Hummingbird runs nozzles back and forth on rails
| suspended from each pivot span. But they're difficult to
| keep running.
|
| Ag is hard. It's dusty. The weather can be brutal. Stuff
| gets left out year round. The turnover is high. Schedules
| are dynamic and unforgiving (when the weather turns, you
| have to adapt your whole operation). There's not a lot of
| highly technical staff to maintain things; bailing wire and
| bandaids is a real thing. The tradition of "hacking things"
| to keep them working comes from farmers.
|
| The more complicated your machinery, the more your MTBF
| product goes up. So complicated units don't scale well.
|
| If a single sprinkler on a pivot fails or misbehaves,
| there's nearly 400 of them and there's some overlap. If
| your "robot" stalls out with some grit or a power supply
| issue or a bricked update, or leaky hydraulics, you just
| lost 1/10 of your pivot. Pray it happens on an inner span,
| rather than an outer one.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| I think you meant the MTBF goes down.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Meganeura is an insect too, so most civil drones are
| already smaller than biggest insects.
|
| It's interesting to note how the size of Meganeura is
| credited to environmental factors (oxygen ration in the
| air). Context is everything, as usual.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meganeura
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| If only there were swarms of self replicating autonomous
| systems that can heal, recharge and defend themselves without
| input and adapt to new situations, while being stress tested
| for free for millions of years.
|
| But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans
| would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.
| ben_w wrote:
| Snark aside, as useful as the birds and the bees are, they've
| got their own goals, and those goals aren't always aligned
| with ours -- hence the use of pesticides and insecticides, or
| indeed scarecrows, in the first place.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Of course but it's not like if collaboration, coercion,
| manipulation and environment crafting were ineffective
| tools to influence life.
|
| It used to be our fav tools, now we just don't go in that
| direction much anymore.
|
| We could study, teach, bread, terraform, integrate and so
| on at a much larger scale and with better tech. It's
| just... It doesn't look like a product.
| bsaul wrote:
| A Sci-Fi fan biology researcher friend of mine joked a long
| time ago that the culmination of cybertech is biotech.
| fangorn wrote:
| Sounds like we need a G.E.C.K.!
| worldsayshi wrote:
| And G.E.C.K. kind of sounds like http://opensourceecology.org
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Oh lovely. OSE is still doing good. I remember reading up
| on the project a decade or so ago back when it was
| basically just a wiki and a handful of engineers.
|
| The project is pretty well thought out and extremely
| ambitious. I can only hope they continue to make good
| progress on it.
| leobg wrote:
| We had such a system. It was called slavery. Lots of cheap
| labor. And still we arranged our crops in the style of
| vineyards, so as to reduce to travel time of workers between
| plants.
| munbun wrote:
| Subsequently sending us into a future forecasted by Michael
| Crichton's Prey
| blubbi wrote:
| Not a drone yet, but hey, less than 200kg are pretty much
| flyweight in farming ;) https://dahliarobotics.com/video
|
| It doesn't even need to use herbicides because it removes weeds
| mechanically. We actually build it to also fit into Europe's
| small(er) scale farms as well.
|
| Regarding the energy issues mentioned multiple times in various
| threads here: We managed to make it solar powered and battery
| buffered to work autonomously for more than a working day.
|
| Disclosure: Co-funder of the company
| lancesells wrote:
| I feel this dream of robots everywhere gets us farther from a
| garden of Eden.
|
| To cultivate the earth we're going to mine other parts of it?
| I'm not suggesting getting rid of the tools that improve
| quality of life but does automating one aspect not cause 100
| other things down the line? There's mining, factories,
| repairing, replacing.
|
| Maybe instead of robots we work on getting people to have
| gardens on their property, in cities use the rooftops, stop
| importing foods from across the globe, etc.
| ForrestN wrote:
| I love this vision and hope it becomes the dominant telos for
| all of the work underway in this area. In addition to
| "beautiful farm," imagine a world where farms, parks, wildlife
| preserves, decarbonization centers, and biological research
| hubs are all the same place? No reason these swarms can't be
| optimizing/managing a native ecosystem food-forest with high
| yield in mind... and likewise easy to imagine unobtrusive,
| silent robots that don't stand in the way of the ecosystem's
| normal functioning.
| [deleted]
| rmason wrote:
| Watching that video made me joyful. I was an agronomist in the
| early nineties walking soybean fields twelve hours a day
| mapping weeds and then going back to the office making what's
| called postemerge chemical recommendations to get most of the
| weeds that I had observed.
|
| During those hot days having then written software for a hobby
| I thought there has to be a better way. Could a sprayer map
| weeds and apply chemicals in a single pass? I did an in depth
| investigation talking to tech people and university experts to
| see if what I imagined was possible. What I found out was that
| we were decades away from the tech making it possible.
|
| A couple of years later Monsanto came out with Roundup
| resistant soybeans and my soybean field walking was greatly
| reduced overnight. Problem with this one solution fits all was
| that soybean yields dipped with the resistant beans for farmers
| that previously had good weed control and we began to develop
| more Roundup resistant weeds.
|
| I did notice that this company is working with high value crops
| only. I believe the reason is the tech currently is quite
| expensive. Though in time the cost should come down as more
| farmers use it.
|
| One problem for the Eastern states is the use of shields on the
| boom. The company that I worked for experimented with shields
| on our commercial sprayers. In fact we were the first people to
| do it East of the Rocky Mountains. We bought them because we
| wanted to be able to spray on windy days. The shields had
| problems and were parked in the weeds in a single crop season.
| diordiderot wrote:
| The best parts of that job was when you stood still for a
| minute late in the season, completely oblivious to the stream
| of fire ants pouring into your boots
| tomcam wrote:
| In my case the hornets nest I stepped on while admiring our
| huge 250+ year-old walnut tree
| rmason wrote:
| I could tell stories for hours. The scariest one:
|
| I did a lot of soil testing. Refused to go out on November
| 15th, the start of deer season, after the 4WD pickup I was
| using was shot up in a field. I hugged the floorboard as
| shots went through the truck and just over me. How a bright
| yellow pickup could be confused with a deer is beyond me.
| dsfyu404ed wrote:
| >How a bright yellow pickup could be confused with a deer
| is beyond me.
|
| It wasn't. It was confused with a government vehicle. The
| one day a year that is synonymous with hunting accidents
| just provided plausible deniability for taking a few pot
| shots.
| pvaldes wrote:
| That would be a good time to use those extra-loud non-
| stop alarm in your car.
|
| Every single people working in their property should have
| one working non-stop in the deer season to signal that is
| not a deer. Some just are deertonic and unable to
| distinguish it from cars.
| askvictor wrote:
| I wonder how long it will take weeds to evolve to being
| 'invisible' to the robots' eyes.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Well, the invisible ones will thrive immediately. So, 1
| generation.
| MikePlacid wrote:
| How do you know they are not thriving already?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| All competition removed.
|
| This sprayer is _designed_ to promote the growth of
| {everything it doesn 't kill}. Those 'weeds' will have as
| much benefit from the spot-spraying as the crop. Which is
| either significant, or it's negligible (and this sprayer
| is useless, so probably not that)
| bluGill wrote:
| > the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big
| tractors:
|
| You are missing something important: soil compaction is a sub
| linear function of weight. which means that larger tractors
| that cover more area with the same tire tracks are must
| friendly for the soil, compared to many small tractors. Because
| of this factor larger is better. Eventually we may get to the
| point where the tractor runs on tracks, to allow even bigger
| tractors that touch a smaller are of soil.
|
| Sure flying drones will have less soil compaction, and they
| will have a place in the future, but keeping something in the
| air uses vastly more energy than wheels on the ground.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| I think future is bioengineering new organisms/robots that
| balance ecosystem. So simply modified biological organisms that
| can't reproduce
| tomxor wrote:
| > applying these principles to maintaining an edible
| polyculture ecosystem-farm
|
| Yup, actually if you read between the edits toward the end of
| the video I think this is in the minds of those working on it,
| not sure why it wasn't focused on more, perhaps because it
| sounds less immediately practical... once the automation is
| somewhat intelligent, the need for a monoculture for viable
| large scale agriculture is diminished.
|
| In fact at a certain point of sophistication, especially when
| harvesting a polyculture becomes viable, it will probably flip
| and become significantly more profitable long term to abandon
| monoculture... since the soil health will improve over time
| which also improves yields.
| AOsborn wrote:
| Absolutely, swarms make a lot of sense.
|
| Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-
| driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is
| that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable
| target could be something like 'one human to operate the
| location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance
| will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues
| can be corrected in a reasonable length of time.
| [deleted]
| ForrestN wrote:
| Furthermore, with the right sensors, there's an opportunity
| for the swarm to self-correct without human intervention
| based on results. It doesn't have to be exactly right at the
| moment, because any ill effects will be noticeable and
| fixable well after a mistake is made.
| karaokeyoga wrote:
| Reading the comments in this thread reminded me of "Silent
| Running" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running). Droids
| (albeit 70s-style), agro-tech, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi.
| It's dated but enjoyable.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| > dated but enjoyable.
|
| And very, very sad.
| bradknowles wrote:
| I'm glad I wasn't the only one thinking that.
|
| Of course, that movie does have certain other implications
| and side effects....
| [deleted]
| metaljr wrote:
| Can this happen in developing countries like India?
| laserbeam wrote:
| Anything can, but most likely it won't happen there first.
| balaji1 wrote:
| It will happen. India will follow anything the West does (good
| and bad). Disclaimer: I don't know much about state of Indian
| farms today.
| KingLancelot wrote:
| That's a really cool and innovative way to fix the world without
| using pesticides, use lil robots.
| jeffrogers wrote:
| Some portion of the vision and spray tech was invented long ago
| by Patchen Selective Spray Systems. At some point, I believe John
| Deere bought the company.
| [deleted]
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Freethink brings a high degree of polish to their videos. Great
| for promotion. Not so sure about the 'think' part yet.
|
| Another interesting Freethink video: "Generalist vs. specialist:
| Which Is Better?". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER2R-F68L0c
| jldugger wrote:
| Designing things like this was part of my embedded engineering
| project coursework 20 years ago. Obviously we didnt have CV and
| had to rely on heueristics like 'weeds have a different
| spectogram in near IR' but the idea has been a long time coming.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| One thought I had while watching that the video didn't seem to
| explore is that if you can precisely map the field and remember
| every plant, and you have 4 million plants on your field, then it
| seems like you could enable precise experiments. Need to find the
| best mix for fertilizer or pesticides? Seems like you could do
| very precise and large N experiments to nail down what is best
| for your plants in your field and possibly eke out some
| additional return by doing so.
| nevdka wrote:
| You can go further than that. Monitor every plant's lifecycle
| and yield, and save the best for seed. How many generations
| before you get superwheat? You could even have multiple strains
| for the varying soil conditions across a single field. Add
| genetic testing, and you can boost genetic diversity for
| disease resistance. All without attracting 'GMO' labels.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| This won't help with breeding at all. You can already monitor
| plants lifecycle and yeild
| bluGill wrote:
| Farmers are already doing that. You don't need to map out each
| individual plant, as there isn't really much you can do with
| that level of data. Just map the field down to small squares
| each covering a few square meters and that is good enough.
| Going to the individual plant doesn't help as you can't do
| anything to one plant that won't leak to the next, but even if
| you could the difference between what two plants next to either
| other need is insignificant. Across a whole field there is a
| big difference though, so you want to break the field up some.
| hericium wrote:
| It still uses some "95% less" chemicals to kill plants. Why not
| laser, some pull-from-ground mechanism or scissors to get rid of
| unwanted plants?
| Tade0 wrote:
| Many weeds store most of their energy/nutrients in deep roots.
| You cut down the visible part and shortly after that it regrows
| like it's nothing.
|
| The city gardening service in my neighbourhood is waging
| constant war on what appears to be a forest of bushes now,
| which they unwittingly sow and expand through cutting plants
| with ripe fruit.
|
| Not only do the parent plants regrow, a new generation is
| formed each time they do it.
|
| My relative is an agricultural engineer and her recommendation
| is a drop of Roundup on top of every unwanted specimen.
| hericium wrote:
| > Many weeds store most of their energy/nutrients in deep
| roots.
|
| On the other hand, plants exchange nutrients and also harmful
| stuff via their root systems. That's why you plant "companion
| plants" for other plants to grow quicker.
|
| Spraying unwanted plants with sub-centimeter accuracy seems
| pointless since these plants transfer those chemicals to
| unsprayed plants.
|
| > You cut down the visible part and shortly after that it
| regrows like it's nothing.
|
| If you cut the plant close to the ground, will it really
| regrow as a properly pruned plant? What if you cut it
| multiple times, just as it starts regrowing?
| selcuka wrote:
| Spray is cheaper, and when you can precisely target the weeds
| you can use less harmful chemicals, such as acetic acid or even
| hot water.
| bluGill wrote:
| acetic acid is more harmful than the chemicals that farmers
| are using, plus it is only effective in much larger
| quantities. Sure we use it in cooking, but that doesn't mean
| it is safe.
|
| Look up the SDS for various chemicals, it can be very eye
| opening. Some common household stuff is very dangerous.
| bluGill wrote:
| Cultivators used to be very common before chemical sprays. They
| did work, but the energy - read CO2 emissions - was a lot
| higher. You are dragging some metal through the ground - think
| of aerodynamic problems on steroids.
|
| Now there is opportunity to only put the hoe in the ground, and
| some are working on that. It will still use more energy than
| chemicals, but it only uses the energy where needed, and avoids
| chemical resistance so I think there is a place for it. (but
| see the other replies - there are other limits)
| [deleted]
| popol12 wrote:
| Glad to hear that humans will be able to continue ruining the
| planet after the last bee dies
| jws wrote:
| Maybe a dispensing system which more selectively targets the
| weeds should instead of using less killer, use a less effective
| killer.
|
| Instead of some clever bit of selective plant killing molecular
| wizardry, just spray the weed with lye (NaOH). Dissolve the weed
| and any overspray or residual will lightly raise the pH of the
| soil. If you have alkaline soil problems, then maybe use
| sulphuric acid instead.
| [deleted]
| defrost wrote:
| For those interested _Landline_ the Australian farming (stock,
| agriculture and related) weekly news roundup [1] has been
| reporting on Agri-bots and automated farming regular for the past
| five years (and since ~1980 if you allow the early reporting on
| the sheep shearing robot project at UWA) [2].
|
| In the vision augmented weed spray domain (the subject of this
| posted video) there has been reporting on both heavy tractor
| dragged units (for covering entire 1,000+ acre farms) and,
| perhaps more interestingly, lightweight solar powered spray bots
| that have minimal soil impact and intermittent deployment
| patterns.
|
| Weeds patch up and spotting initial patches from air drones and
| then deploying a light spray bot to target individual weeeds is
| effective in many ways; kill time before spread, fuel usage
| (solar), minimal total deployment, soil impact, etc.
|
| [1] https://iview.abc.net.au/show/landline
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZAh2zv7TMM
| bitL wrote:
| On one hand, this will maximize crop per area. On the other hand,
| it will kill off all insects that require diverse sets of plants,
| causing issues in the food chain above. The long-term
| consequences are unknown, likely not good.
| bluSCALE4 wrote:
| I'd think you'd be able to identify good and bad bugs. If you
| mean killing off bad bugs will have unknown consequences, then
| yeah, probably.
| lm28469 wrote:
| It's not the chemicals that kill bugs afaik, just the fact
| that what was once a very diverse eco system became XX sqkm
| of the same plant growing on basically dead soil
|
| This robot would not change that problem
|
| What we'd need is sustainable farming with crop rotation and
| lots of diversity, but this is less efficient and farmers are
| already not making a ton of profit
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Some good bugs need plant diversity.
| bitL wrote:
| Good bugs often need bad bugs to thrive, so do birds.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| What do you think currently happens in most fields? I'll give
| you a hint. They dont just let weeds grow.
| bitL wrote:
| It's already a problem, I agree. Another big problem is the
| increasing measurable presence of those chemicals in
| pastry/bread/flour these days, with unknown long-term
| effects.
| quixoticelixer- wrote:
| The levels in most flour etc is in the parts per billion.
| The long term effects are already pretty well known. It is
| not an issue
| [deleted]
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