[HN Gopher] Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine indu...
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Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine industry
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 40 points
Date : 2022-11-17 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.cornell.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.cornell.edu)
| andtheboat wrote:
| "People are part of terroir"
|
| The most common type of machine automation in the wine industry
| is the use of optical sorters - no longer do you need rows of
| people separating good grapes from raisains and debris. The
| machine scans what's going through the shoot and uses multiple
| prongs to flick anything unwanted into a separate container. The
| sorters are even transportable to different wineries and
| vineyards.
|
| The issue is that wine is not an engineering product, people
| don't want it all to taste the same. These machines do have
| calibration but in my experience we're getting too close to wine
| as a generic product. That is my fear with something like this -
| we know more than ever about grapes and when to harvest, we lose
| what makes a wine unique.
|
| So while I praise this product and the exciting world of
| agricultural technology - just not sure it's the right direction
| for wine.
| sgu999 wrote:
| Just another way to replace moderately qualified jobs by some
| opaque tech. I understand why it happens, but this isn't
| progress. Making good wine requires dedication and experience
| from everyone involved, that's not what you'll buy when you get
| one of these perfectly controlled products. But let's Ikea
| everything non essential as well... that's good for the wealthy
| after all.
| cinntaile wrote:
| You'll still be able to buy wine from handpicked grapes, it'll
| (eventually) just cost a premium.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| In Northern California's olive growing regions I've been noticing
| a trend towards tearing out old olive trees and replacing them
| with trees that are grown on trellises in the same fashion as
| grapes. This appears to be done to utilize the picking robots
| that were specialized for vineyards. It's interesting to think
| that pruning practices like espalier, coppicing and hedging could
| be brought back to utilize robotics efficiently for any number of
| fruiting trees and bushes.
|
| Kinda wish we got rid of timber fences and just put up hedges of
| fruit trees all in between houses, with roaming robots to tend to
| their production.
| alecco wrote:
| That's weird. Most modern plantations use the "Super Intensive"
| method with specialized machines.
|
| https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=4RnDldkqUb4
| nanomonkey wrote:
| The video displays exactly what I'm talking about though. The
| machinery is build around olive trees grown as hedges instead
| of the traditional tree shapes that requires shaking or
| ladders.
|
| Olives as trees don't require wires to grow on like grape
| vines, sorry if that was what you thought I was implying.
| bergenty wrote:
| Is that really a trend? Because olive trees take decades to
| grow and at least 3 years to bear so I have a hard time
| believing they're being ripped out and restarted.
| nanomonkey wrote:
| I believe some of this is due to changes in what types of
| olives were considered desirable. I'm not an expert, but some
| of the green stuffing olives have been replaced with
| different varieties. Also there are pests and diseases that
| are taking over, so newer resistant varieties are valuable
| replacements.
|
| Three years is also not a terrible time period compared to
| other nut trees that are grown in the area, specially if
| harvesting can be improved to be less manual. Some of the
| trees that are being replaced are 80-100 years old, so the
| wood can be a valuable resource that will cover the costs.
| josefresco wrote:
| I recently volunteered to help a local vineyard harvest their
| grapes. It was a learning experience, and I thought about robots
| and if they'd be suitable. Part of the "skill" involved was
| leaving grapes on the vine that hadn't ripened 100%. Furthermore,
| the care required to gently clip and extract the grapes from a
| "viney" plant without damage or loss was sometimes tricky. Hard
| to see a robot mastering the process, without changes in how the
| grapes are grown/attached.
| bathMarm0t wrote:
| Even more so when you see how quickly a skilled harvester runs
| through a vineyard. They're pulling clusters almost every other
| second.
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| No need for speed when your runtime costs nothing.
| matxd wrote:
| It looks like autonomous robots are on everyone's lips lately,
| that's awesome, because it's really interesting topic (at least
| for me). What would you suggest reading to create my first robot?
| I mean the hardware part, not the programming one. Thank you
| amelius wrote:
| The hard part about robotics is that you're interfacing with
| the real world, where everything can go wrong. It's like you
| take a program and run it on a CPU with a radiation source next
| to it. All your strong invariants suddenly become a "maybe".
| Not literally of course, but that's how it feels if you start
| your robot for the 100th time thinking nothing can go wrong
| this time ...
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| 'Handbook of Robotics' by Siciliano & Khatib.
|
| It covers a lot from principles to application, it was the book
| that clicked for me in terms of understanding kinematics of
| robots.
| carapace wrote:
| The old TAB books on robotics are pretty good IMO. Not the
| electronics section, that's mostly out of date, but all the
| physical stuff like motors and kinetics is still pretty
| topical.
|
| E.g. "The Complete Handbook of Robotics" by Edward L. Safford,
| Jr. https://archive.org/details/completehandbook0000saff
|
| - - - -
|
| OOOooooo! See also "Cybernetics A to Z" by V. Pekelis that just
| made it to the front page:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639261 It looks
| fantastic!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I remember my public library having that Safford book when i
| was a kid and when the world was going crazy about C3P0 and
| R2D2.
| antoniuschan99 wrote:
| I have a dobot mg400 but you can get a dobot magician or
| elephant robotics cobots which are affordable too.
|
| https://www.instagram.com/kokonautinc
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Check out the stuff at Pololu robotics, they have parts all the
| way up to full kits
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Super weird thing to be downvited for
| shiftpgdn wrote:
| For practical experience the jetson nano jetbot is a really fun
| project. Combines 3d printing, computer vision, motor control,
| etc.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| There is low hanging fruit in this specific application for
| Agbots.
|
| The way wine grapes are grown, carefully trained and groomed to
| grow in a line, a specific shape and orientation, almost like an
| entire field of carefully shaped bonsai trees. Once it's
| established, a vineyard doesn't change much year to year. It's a
| ideal place to start with agbots and get things right before
| going to more complicated applications. The labor costs are also
| high, and highly seasonal as many of these vineyards are in
| expensive coastal areas like Nor Cal.
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