[HN Gopher] RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes
___________________________________________________________________
RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes
Author : smurda
Score : 55 points
Date : 2025-12-10 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (phys.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (phys.org)
| asymmetric wrote:
| Tangentially related: https://farm.bot/
| GiorgioG wrote:
| $5,000-7,000...that's crazy.
| daemonologist wrote:
| What's crazy is that it only does the easy stuff (planting
| and watering). What we need is a robot to do the hard stuff
| (in my home-gamer opinion: pest control and weeding; maybe
| picking is most relevant for commercial agriculture).
| dekhn wrote:
| I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture, but
| they really need to check in with the field before coming up with
| prototypes like this, because they are duplicating existing
| things (ag companies already do this), making hardware that would
| never survive the field (ag companies already solved this), and
| obscenely expensive (ag companies come up with better cheaper
| solutions).
| 9rx wrote:
| _> I understand the desire of academics to help agriculture,
| but they really need to check in with the field before coming
| up with prototypes like this_
|
| Do they? Academia is about the individual. It is not about
| others. Sometimes what an academic comes up with ends up being
| applicable to a larger audience, but that's not the goal.
| Industry is where people try to do things for others.
| dekhn wrote:
| I mean, if you're an academic and you don't care if anybody
| uses your technology, that's fine, I guess, but the folks
| publishing these papers want the industry to use their ideas:
| "In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing
| the need for automated harvesting using robots." is the very
| first sentence.
| 9rx wrote:
| That's a product of coming up through a school system that
| emphasizes writing engaging content to please teachers. "Oh
| no, the farmers can't find help" sounds alarming and draws
| you in. But as you point out, it ends there. Beyond that,
| the academic goes off and does whatever is interesting to
| him personally without concern for what anyone else might
| actually need. And fair enough. He'd be working in industry
| if he were trying to please others.
|
| And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor
| shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm
| work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold
| without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other
| farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
| dekhn wrote:
| I mean, many of us in academia (I was previously) have
| made things for industry only to learn that we ignored
| something important and obvious that was already known. I
| wish I could find the nice article that gave a bunch of
| examples of papers and concluded "John Deere already
| sells this product and it's being used at scale today; if
| you want to do better, at least be aware of what's going
| on in the field"
| 9rx wrote:
| I'll grant you that people who don't understand the
| difference between academia and industry might mistakenly
| push themselves towards academia when they really want to
| be in industry, but we shouldn't take that as an
| understanding that academia and industry serve the same
| function. They have different names exactly because they
| are expected to be different. Academia is where one goes
| to explore oneself in pursuit of one's interests.
| Industry is where one goes to explore others in pursuit
| of serving their needs.
| dekhn wrote:
| I disagree.
|
| For example, I work for a company called Genentech that
| was founded by an academic. They discovered something
| important (how to clone genes) and shortly after, found
| medical applications (human growth hormone and insulin)
| that transformed treatment,
|
| We carry out open-ended research on human biology, have
| many visitors from academia, along with dual appointments
| (person is both a professor and a scientist at the
| company), publish in the same journals as academics,
| etc...
|
| And this is highly incentivized by the government: Bayh-
| Dole act makes universities want to patent tech that gets
| licensed by industry.
| 9rx wrote:
| Where do you disagree? You point out that individuals are
| not statues and can shift between spending time in
| industry and in academia. You also point out that
| industry and academia are not confined by who owns the
| building that the people are occupying. But nobody was
| ever thinking that wasn't the case.
|
| This is the first time anyone has even considered that
| someone could be forever stuck an academic or industry
| operative, or that industry can't take place in
| universities and academics in private businesses. Good on
| you for coming up with hypothetical alternatives suitable
| for a sci-fi thriller. You've clearly got a creative
| mind! But since they are only hypothetical, it is not
| clear what purpose they serve here or how it even could
| begin to relate to anything being discussed.
| Animats wrote:
| Here's the video "Fanuc already sells this product and
| it's being used at scale today."[1] This works in a very
| orderly greenhouse, one of the largest in Europe.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nOdiwKDXYM
| averageRoyalty wrote:
| > And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor
| shortage".
|
| Are you a Japanese farmer? The context of the paper was
| Japanese, and there is absolutely a labour shortage. Your
| section of the world is a timy percentage, and whilst I'm
| glad you don't have a shortage, your experience is not
| the worlds.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Your section of the world is a timy percentage_
|
| That's fair, but the same thing is said here too. It's a
| common trope that gets repeated because it sounds catchy,
| not because it is true.
|
| _> and there is absolutely a labour shortage._
|
| Is there? Everything I can find suggests that Japan is no
| different than here: That farmers want to do more, but
| struggle to grow their operations under to the intense
| competition of every other farmer wanting to do the same.
|
| What you find here, and seemingly also in Japan, is some
| farms that have gotten too big for their britches that
| cry "labor shortage" instead of "you know, maybe I should
| downsize and let someone else have a turn". That's not a
| labor shortage. If you can bleed them dry selling them
| your technology, good on ya! You absolutely should. But
| there is no need to worry about them. Letting them fail
| solves the problem just the same.
|
| But if what you say is true, please point me to where I
| can find all this unutilized farmland that cannot be
| managed because there isn't anyone to do it. I am quite
| interested in becoming the one to take it over. I may not
| be a Japanese farmer today, but life is not static.
| zipy124 wrote:
| That sentence is because in engineering journals you often
| need to state some problem you are solving. Proving the
| problem exists isn't necessary, just enough to convince the
| editor. Most academics don't care if someone uses the
| technology, just like most software engineers don't care
| about the user of their product.
| dekhn wrote:
| Yes it's the same reason in grad school they taught us to
| write grant proposals that cure diseases of senators and
| congresspeople, while actually working on fundamental
| research problems that have no direct applicability.
| esafak wrote:
| This is the Engineering- not Literature department. People
| expect it to be useful.
| reachableceo wrote:
| Really? Can you link to those solutions please ?
| ramy_d wrote:
| I'm looking at something like this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4Dc6QNWiIs and I feel like
| they are doing totally different things. Both harvest tomatoes,
| but these are totally different approaches.
| ruslan wrote:
| Did you see tamatoes harvested that way ? They are suitable
| only for producing sauce.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > making hardware that would never survive the field
|
| What I saw in the article was a prototype and see no reason for
| it to be "field ready."
| zzzeek wrote:
| > In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the
| need for automated harvesting using robots.
|
| This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive
| immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's
| at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding
| immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but
| like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if
| immigration policy is liberalized.
|
| So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre
| technological solution to what's actually a political issue.
|
| [1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-
| integration/regionalprof...
| standardUser wrote:
| I agree about immigration, but the world has a large amount of
| very fertile land in places with very high costs of living.
| Bringing in large numbers of new immigrants at ultra low pay
| will have big consequences in most high-cost countries. It's
| worked well in the US, but that's because of our (former)
| identity as a nation of immigrants and the massive overlap
| between US and Latin American culture. In other nations, the
| outcome could very well be a racially/culturally incompatible
| underclass working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs,
| with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.
| HanClinto wrote:
| "Tomatoes typically bear fruit in clusters, requiring robots to
| pick the ripe ones while leaving the rest on the vine, demanding
| advanced decision-making and control capabilities."
|
| At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their
| harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)?
|
| This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing
| product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" --
| I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for
| growers to aim for.
|
| Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort
| of thing is already in place.
|
| Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit
| locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces
| fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding
| cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit
| clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like
| in the future?
| ac29 wrote:
| The way greenhouse tomatoes are grown is already pretty robot
| friendly.
|
| See below for a couple examples:
|
| https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-...
|
| https://tta-iso.com/innovations/harvai
| mcguirep wrote:
| > I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step
| for growers to aim for.
|
| > Is this already being done?
|
| This is, indeed, already something that is done. As I
| understand it, for tomatoes it's typically for canning
| varieties, but they're called determinate cultivars[1]. Even
| with those, I know in processing you still have to discard the
| occasional fruit that isn't ripe.
|
| I imagine this kind of technological solution would also be
| more useful when picking tomatoes for use as the fresh fruit.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinate_cultivar
| Hasz wrote:
| It is done for entire species.
|
| There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to
| mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US
| due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues.
|
| If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend
| https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/
|
| for many fruits you will have never seen before.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Loquat cardamom jam is pure sex on a buttered english muffin.
| Probably the most satisfying flavor I've ever consumed,
| certainly there is no more satisfying flavor. Sadly just as
| my tree started producing bumper crops a historic freeze
| killed it.
| ge96 wrote:
| I'm wanting to do this for dead leaves/pruning
|
| Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and
| pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-10 23:01 UTC)