Japanese Robot Picks Only the Ripest Strawberries 202
kkleiner writes "The Institute of Agricultural Machinery at Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, along with SI Seiko, has developed a robot that can select and harvest strawberries based on their color. Ripened berries are detected using the robot's stereoscopic cameras, and analyzed to measure how red they appear. When the fruit is ready to come off the vine, the robot quickly locates it in 3D space and cuts it free. From observation to collection, the harvesting process takes about 9 seconds per berry. Creators estimate that it will be able to cut down harvesting time by 40%."
One step... (Score:4, Funny)
One step away from harvesting humans!
These robots are the real zombies, they need brains to power their neural net.
can strawberries ripen in transit? (Score:3)
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Re:can strawberries ripen in transit? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that ethylene is bad, it's that ripening off the vine sucks. You're stuck with the amount of flavor when picked, ethylene just softens the fruit. On the vine the fruit can keep adding flavor as it softens. Strawberries are really only good ripened on the vine and eaten within 24 hours of being picked. Anything else is a pale imitation.
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So than the real solution is to grow food in the locale where its in demand, and have robotics handle the picking and logistics. You're never going to get around time to market if you need to pick the fruit in California and ship it to New York.
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It is over 97% percent accurate! (Score:2, Funny)
In under 3% of cases the robot shoots the strawberry with a rocket launcher.
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But only the ripe ones!
Well, or so we think, it's kinda hard to tell...
How to change economics to fit abundance... (Score:4, Informative)
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery [google.com]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
and whats the fail out when very few have health c (Score:2)
and whats the fail out when very few have health care? after all the jobs are gone?
Jam packed jails and lockup with people who just go in to get some health care?
lots of sick people who make the rich who can pay for it get sick off the people who can pay for it?
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Well, if you automatize every menial job away, there won't me much to do for a lot of the population than sucking the owning classes' dicks and licking their boots. You want to go there?
Right, but on the other hand, the commodities necessary for basic survival (strawberries, etc) will be manufactured so efficiently that even the underemployed and unemployed will be able to afford them.
So there you have it: the future, where all the menial work is done by robots, and the majority of non-highly-specialized/e
Hunter/gatherer parallels (Score:3)
I think it will be good overall (barring things like irony killing us all)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
since it it a return to hunter/gatherer ideology with high techology, where hunter/gathers spent much of their time just rasining kids, socializing, and doing hobbies or contemplating nature and the infinite.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm [primitivism.com]
The robots are like the botanical plants that people used to pick th
The fallacy of the three sector hypothesis (Score:3)
Related to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-sector_hypothesis [wikipedia.org]
People went from 90% agriculture workers to about 2% agriculutre workers over the past two hundred years in the USA. Of the current agriculutral production, 75% of the effort goes to meat production which is not strictly needed and in general is harming people's health, and otherwise people eat too much of the wrong foods and are obese (see Dr. Fuhrman). Why is agriculture still not using 90% of the labor force? Automation and limited demand.
Co
On limited demand and ways forward (Score:2)
"We will find other unmet wants to work on."
As I explain at the knol and elsewhere, that assumes a few things:
* People in general will not continue a move towards environemntal consciousness, voluntary simplicity, spiritual gorwth, and moving up malsow's heierarchy of needs to more social interaction and self actualization which generally is fairly cheap to do.
* Virtualization using computers won't meet these needs (so, owning a big mansion, but in Second Life where it is cheap to have one);
* Productivity w
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But obviously that hasn't happened, the only people working short hours like that are doing it because they can't get more hours or don't have to support themselves.
Basically a few things happened
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Why the Triple Revolution memo was ahead of time (Score:2)
"But obviously that hasn't happened, "
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/11/17/why-the-triple-revolution-memorandum-was-ahead-of-its-time/ [beyondajob...covery.org]
Trying to be optimistic about social change (Score:2)
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm [commondreams.org]
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary [jamesphogan.com]
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html [pdfernhout.net]
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html [ucsc.edu]
http://www.bluezones.com/ [bluezones.com]
http://books.google.com/books?id=hM_JDjq6V-kC [google.com]
http://books.google.com/books?id=bCuC2H-6k_8C [google.com]
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/depression.shtml [vitamindcouncil.org]
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html [alternativ...tments.com]
See also my comment here on how it's all ab
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Caitalism hits the fan... (Score:2)
...for the credit reason you said: http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/ [capitalismhitsthefan.com]
Basically, instead of giving money from increased productivity to workers as wages, as worker's collective bargaining power eroded for a variety of reasons (automation, women entering the work force, competition from China or other US states like the auto industry moving south, etc.), rich people kept all the money from productivity increases and *loaned* it to the workers instead. That eventually collapsed.
localism and 3D printing (Score:2)
Yes, being able to produce energy at home with reneables like solar panel,s and being able toprint your own stuff in a 3D printer (and even recycle stuff back into raw materials) is a form of capitalims that connects with the locaism solution I mention (among others of a gift economy a basic income, and democratic resource-base plannin).
See writings by Kevin Carson for more ideas on how we might all become capitalists in that sense, even as we move beyond other aspects of capitalism.
http://mu [blogspot.com]
Parable on structural unemployment & basic inc (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p14bAe6AzhA [youtube.com]
I made that to address the issues you raise...
Which are also addressed in the knol, too.
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery#Four_long(2D)term_heterodox_alternatives [google.com]
See also my comments here in response to Martin Ford's blog post:
http://econfuture.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/robots-jobs-and-our-assumptions/ [wordpress.com]
"In brief, a combination of robotics and other automation, better design, and voluntary social networks are decreasing t
Preventing violent revolutions and genocides (Score:2)
I'm hoping for more of a gradual non-violent evolution into these changes over the next twenty to thirty years, myself:
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_nonviolence.html [ucsc.edu]
But, with all the ironies of people using these technologies of abundance to produce super fancy weapons like military robots to fight over percieved scaricty, it is worriesome. Rather than military robots to enforce a social order based on gettign peopel to worl like robots, why not just build robots to
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Very interesting. Thanks for your work on this. I'll read it.
Meanwhile, for everyone else, here's a sci-fi primer on the idea of Burger-G and how you can expect to lose your job:
Manna [marshallbrain.com]
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You're welcome.
Manna and other stuff by Marshall Brain was part of the inspiration for it.
Democratic planning is only one aspect.. (Score:2)
Manuel De Landa talks about how all real systems are meshworks and hierarchies. I suggest the future will be a mix of a gift economy, a basic income, stronger local economies with improved local subsistence, and democratic resource-based planning.
Markets can be good when eveyone has about equal purchasing power and when things cost their true costs, accounting for externalities like pollution or the cost of enforcement or systematic risk. But in order to do that often takes some demoncratic resource-based c
Reducing illegal immigration? (Score:5, Interesting)
Get the price of such robots down enough and there'll be little incentive to pay sub-par wages to migrant field workers. (Regardless of immigration status, but illegals are more exploitable.)
Conversely it could be because we've long had a source of cheap field labor that the US agricultural machinery business hasn't made such advances in robotics. Pity, really -- many of the issues a robotic strawberry picker has to deal with are common to the activity of a whole range of other robots. Build a general purpose agricultural field worker robot and have alternate software loads (and perhaps interchangeable picker mechanisms) for blueberries, tomatoes, whatever.
(Such picker robots, with appropriate sensors, could also be adapted to tasks like minefield clearing. Although that might lead to a scenario like that in the TV adaptation of Heinlein's "Jerry Was a Man".)
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To paraphrase Heinlein - Humans can make more humans, that's a trick that robots haven't figured out yet.
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Yeah, but we're fucked if they figure out how to make more robots....
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"Unless you change the socioeconomic fabric of most of the 'third world' or somehow manage to pull off a full scale device copier ala Neal Stephenson or Star Trek, the economics are always going to strongly favor the cheap, disposable, highly configurable human."
In skilled trades, sometimes, but you typed that post using a computer that wouldn't be possible with pure manual labor.
In repetitive shitwork, not so much.
Re:Reducing illegal immigration? (Score:5, Interesting)
Picking grapes by machine would be very interesting. If you drive around the south of France, you see fields of grapes for miles, all of which need to be harvested by hand to make wine. There's often quite a short period between the grapes being read to harvest and being overripe for wine making, and harvesting them at exactly the right point can make a big difference to the quality of the final product. If you could make robots that would travel up and down the fields quickly, revisiting each vine each day over a week or so and picking the grapes at exactly the right time (rather than, as humans do, when the majority are at the right level of ripeness), then I can imagine that you'd have some customers who would be very happy to pay a premium for the machine.
I doubt the situation is the same for strawberries. They aren't exactly luxury goods and so cost is the most important factor.
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If you could make robots that would travel up and down the fields quickly, revisiting each vine each day over a week or so and picking the grapes at exactly the right time (rather than, as humans do, when the majority are at the right level of ripeness), then I can imagine that you'd have some customers who would be very happy to pay a premium for the machine.
You would bet right [wikipedia.org]. Mechanical harvesting of grapes has been around for a while. Almonds, too.
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Depends on your locality, but in Hong Kong strawberries are luxury goods. Only available in winter (then it's cold enough for them to grow), and at really high prices due to limited space to grow them, and requirement of import from far away.
To save cost, some local farms (yes there are farms in Hong Kong) organise "pick your own" days, where the customer can come to the farm and pick the strawberries they want to buy themselves.
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Nope. There's plenty of farmland around in Japan; a fair amount of high-quality farmland lies fallow, in fact, from a lack of interest in using it. The reasons for the interest in factory farms (the indoor farming you've seen) and robotics are somewhat different. It's potentially much more effective and with higher-quality yield than open-field farming, where each plant gets the optim
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Yomiuri Shinbun just ran a series of articles looking at the current state of agriculture, using official figures as a base. Here is one relevant piece in English (warning: articles disappear offline after a few days): http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/business/T101130005037.htm [yomiuri.co.jp]
Here's the relevant part:
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Also having grown up on a farm, I'm more optimistic than you.
Robots to work in the cold is not a problem because there are no berries to pick, or anything else to harvest at 20 below zero. Too much heat for people is little trouble for electronics. Almost any chip will take 120 F. The rest is just fans. If we can cool a Pentium 4, we can keep the harvester circuits cool enough.
You do have a point with human supervision required for some cases, but again you can air condition a cab (or a supervisor's trailer
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GPS on a berry farm seems like overkill. Install a two or three local RF beacons. Triangulate off of them.
GPS is probably cheaper and more reliable. Saves you on installing those beacons, and saves you the required calibration. GPS receivers are dirt cheap these days and very accurate, and farms being out in the open tend to have excellent reception.
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And how long until it can distinguish weeds from crops?
That's easy, have the robot rip it out of the ground. If it's back next week, it's a weed. :-)
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GPS units are primarily used in Kansas, and other extremely flat areas. There are superfarms syncing them together to allow one driver to control multiple machines as well. Though that is the stereotype of agriculture, there are many, many places that aren't flat and barren (and where the farms aren't big enough to justify the expense). In those areas the technology isn't catching on nearly as well, because of the issues I mentioned. And I don't know about you, but my car GPS loses strengh on cloudy day
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Rural areas have bad GPS reception?
No. I know how GPS works (physicist with rf&signal processing experience), i see no mechanism for this but false rumors. Furthermore my personal experience tells me that the worst thing for GPS are cities. It takes (i have a quite old unit) 2-5 Minutes to get a fix in Tokyo, but only 20 Seconds if i am in Hakone, even in a mountain area (which are the second worst thing). In the city its actually so bad, i always use "my location" from google map, which does not use GP
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Strawberries are the low hanging fruit, if you'll excuse the pun :)
The robot has to have the video cameras anyway in order to be able to pick the fruit, so you might as well use the same hard to both identify the fruit to be picked and to accurately position the picker arm. One less sensor to build, calibrate and integrate with the rest of the system.
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"Apparently you haven't heard of the Cotton Gin."
The cotton gin wasn't a harvester. It performed efficient processing of manually harvested cotton.
THIS is what modern cotton harvesters look like:
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=cotton+harvester&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=aDD8TIf4AYiq8AaH77mTCw&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCQQsAQwAA&biw=1280&bih=627 [google.com]
No Thank You (Score:4, Interesting)
Seriously.
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Of course it doesn't help that people start to buy things they didn't need and didn't particularly want and definitely couldn't afford.
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Re:No Thank You (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? I have lots of free time, work far shorter hours, have a much higher standard of living than my parents did at my age and a vastly higher standard of living than any of my grandparents did at my age. I'm definitely not super rich (well, except in the sense that anyone living in an industrialised western nation is in the top 10% of the world's wealth), but I certainly would not be able to enjoy my current lifestyle if it were not for the fact that automation has brought down the cost of living comfortably. If wheat still needed to be harvested by men with scythes and clothes still needed to be hand sewn from cloth made by someone with a hand loom that took a week to weave a single piece (from hand-spun wool), then I would be barely able to afford food, let alone clothes.
I live in a society where bread is so cheap that I can afford to eat a few slices from a loaf and then throw the rest of it away! And this isn't even a prerogative of the middle classes, even the 'poor' people can generally afford to do it. I can walk into a hospital or a GP's surgery and be prescribed drugs that will cure diseases that would have killed the richest man in the world a hundred years ago. This is almost entirely due to automation.
Yes, some jobs have gone away, but somehow I don't really find the fact that I never had the opportunity as a child to work in a coal mine particularly upsetting. I am very happy, in contrast, with the fact that I can be paid to write books and articles by a publisher in the USA and by companies all over the world to write code. This would have been completely impossible even thirty years ago and difficult ten or so years ago.
Seriously.
Re:No Thank You (Score:4, Insightful)
And when you get to the bottom line there's very little left over for actual life. I was busting my hump for that money, and it still wasn't realistically enough to live a reasonably good life. Certainly not enough to throw away food or waste stuff I'd paid for.
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My guess would be that whatever it was, if you were doing it (or something comparable) a 100 years ago, your standard of living would've been a lot worse than it is now.
People tend to forget that malnourishment -- not having enough food to eat -- was constant threat for the majority of world's population for, pretty much the entirety of the existence of the human race, right up to the second half of 20th ce
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Are you an immigrant? That is no longer the norm in the US.
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Technology and caste (Score:2)
Probably true, alas.
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So is it better for the humans who lose their jobs picking strawberries 8 hours a day ...
Gain some perspective. It is *not* the task itself, but the *trend* to automate. As machines replace those who for whatever reason choose or find themselves in physical labor, those jobs will go away, and people who are *good but simple* will no longer have jobs. After them, *YOUR* "middle class" job will be eliminated, and you will become part of the Surfs. Think about it, and you will see that in the end of the "Automate Everything" trend, only the rich and super rich will have meaningful lives and the on
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Think about it, and you will see that in the end of the "Automate Everything" trend, only the rich and super rich will have meaningful lives and the only alternative will be subservience.
Only within the existing capitalist framework - which would become more and more redundant in that scenario. There is little doubt that those in power would try to preserve it, but it doesn't have to be that way.
This [marshallbrain.com] is a fairly good treatment of the problem, and both possible outcomes.
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Well sure, the *good but simple* people will lose out, but what about the *mediocre and retarded* people?
You know, if you're that much of an asshole, well, sucks to be you.
In the end, self-centered assholes like you die alone and lonely. So enjoy.
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Sorry, could not resist that one
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Because the "middle class" is increasingly becoming closer to the poorer classes than the rich class?
First Blood? Look at the UI (Score:2)
In the video attached to the story, look at the user interface on the robot - It has a big red button marked "First Blood". Why??
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It has a big red button marked "First Blood". Why??
Obviously this harvesting robot was repurposed from sort of military super-weapon after said weapon was banned by international treaty and the military supplier needed to recoup its investment. There is no chance - no chance! - that it will revert to its original programming later on and begin harvesting humans instead.
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I'm a little concerned - that button may be all that SkyNet needs to begin.
Too slow. (Score:5, Informative)
From observation to collection, the harvesting process takes about 9 seconds per berry. That's too slow.
This isn't the first strawberry-picking robot. Here's one from five years ago. [technovelgy.com] But compare this with a commercial strawberry harvester [youtube.com] that's just digging up the beds. (Note, incidentally, that the tractor is driverless. That's standard precision farming technology today; several GPS manufacturers make the gear for that.)
Automated fruit sorting using computer vision is a routine process, and it's really fast. [youtube.com] Small-fruit sorting machines are strange to watch. Cameras watch the fruit go by, and air jets push it around. This is all happening in bulk, much faster than humans can even watch, as big conveyors pump a stream of mixed product through the machine and streams of sorted product come out.
Robotic tomato pickers have been built by several groups, but so far the machines are too slow and the cost is too high.
In practice, the way agricultural sorting works is that the good stuff is sold is fresh fruit, the not-so-good stuff goes off to make jellies, tomato paste, and such, and the rejected stuff becomes animal feed or fertilizer.
Not the Agriculture Ministry (Score:2)
Institute of Agricultural Machinery
But are they in charge of Gundam [slashdot.org]?
Racist (Score:2)
Agricultural mechanization is for Nazis.
Ministry of Agriculture (Score:2)
I guess they will have to revisit this
statement [wikipedia.org].
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Re:Lot of track? (Score:4, Interesting)
Locomotion and selection are two distinct problems. Presumably the selection/picking components could be added to a suitable chassis designed for navigation real fields (which could support a host of other picking and crop-tending apps).
If not, then they still don't need a track for each row, just a track that can be moved from one row to another. Perhaps make the fields circular with a radial track, like some irrigation systems.
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That's one whale of a big "if". Why would anyone be so stupid as to design the algorithms that way, rather than, for example, take the position/orientation as parameters? For that matter, why worry about the ground at all when you're looking at the strawberries? Plants like strawberries don't grow perfectly upright and square to the ground either.
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I just hope you're not involved with writing any software that I use.
Do you have a problem reaching for and grasping something when you're laying down vs standing up? The bot isn't depending on gravity for anything, it's movements are relative to the camera. Only an idiot would give the arm and the camera separate coordinate systems, and only a bigger idiot would do that and not take the coordinate transforms into account. Although I suppose there are a lot of those around, given the state of software t
Re:Lot of track? (Score:5, Informative)
Having a dozen people lying on their stomach on each side of a tractor puller 'wings' isn't cheaper.
http://www.slk.at/fileadmin/img/Fotobewerb/fw_Gurkenflieger_Norbert_Breuer_4100_Ottensheim.jpg [www.slk.at]
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I suppose that if this provides enough of an advantage, then it makes sense to rework the whole field so that it lies on a perfectly flat and straight grid.
It's been done with warehouses (Kiva for instance), so why not in a field?
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I suppose that if this provides enough of an advantage, then it makes sense to rework the whole field so that it lies on a perfectly flat and straight grid.
It's been done with warehouses (Kiva for instance), so why not in a field?
I think the moisture and other elements in the fields will wreak havoc on this type of competition for human jobs.
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Why? Where's the big difference between this and a railroad? They need a bit of periodic maintenance, but they manage to survive the moisture and elements just fine.
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So? Ever checked what's the weather like in Russia, for instance? Plenty rain and snow, yet the railroads do just fine. Good quality steel, construction and maintenance go a long way.
And why are you so sure they "won't have that luxury"? Like I said, if it makes economic sense, it will be done. The technical possibility is there.
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Railroads have the luxury of having a layer of ballast, usually crushed rock, to lay the track on. Strawberries like to grow in dirt that can easily turn into mud.
Re:Lot of track? (Score:4, Informative)
The video seems to show this moving on smooth straight metal tracks. I wonder how adapting it to travel on uneven dirt paths will affect it's ability to cut the intended strawberry? Either that or they run track up each row in their one square kilometer field.
A lot of premium strawberry production is done hydroponically in greenhouses, especially in Japan. An almost ideal, controlled environment for robotic gardening.
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I think there's a tasteless joke in there, about the robot being Japanese and the cherry being ripe and that this somehow doesn't work out, but I just can't figure out a good punchline.
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Sorry. No bad car analogies came to mind.
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This includes a malfunctioning agricultural robot.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088024/ [imdb.com]
Re:Goodbye Mexicans! (Score:4, Interesting)
While "Goodbye Mexicans" is a bit flamey, automating the jobs locals will never willingly do has always been a logical goal.
When we reduce manual labor, remove some jobs that draw poor people to the US, increase profits and make our farms more competitive we win.
We don't scrap massive combine harvesters in favor of horse-drawn equipment because they enormously increase productivity. Harvesting is dull, dirty, and sometime dangerous, ideal for robots.
Re:Goodbye Mexicans! (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Goodbye Mexicans! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah and don't forget the advertising agencies who advertise and the lawyers who sue and the government inspectors to inspect and the ....
Dude, the only person producing new wealth in your scenario is the the farmer and look at all the overhead you're expecting him to bear.
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The customers are not creating wealth. Sure, they pay the costs but that's a different equation than the one I was talking about. They are consuming, not producing.
Even if you include the consumers, the farmer is the only one of the long list of players who is producing wealth in the US in the poster's scenario.
100 years ago:
Farmer grows strawberries -> farmer markets strawberries. Half the population does farming.
Proposed scenario:
Farmer grows strawberries -> robot picks strawberries, robot breaks an
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Probably the farmer would choose. Unless someone makes the right campaign contributions and "stimulus money" and tax breaks are allocated to "modernization".
But the discussion was about the robot scenario, so it was taken for granted.
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We don't, in this application, NEED to generate local jobs.
The goal is streamlined production, _destruction_ of jobs that draw illegals into the job market, more revenue for the farmer, and more competition in the marketplace.
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So? The farmer will get to keep his profits every year from harvesting, money that would otherwise be sent outside of the country by non-local farm labor.
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I know it's a hot item in the US now, but in the long run globalisation is good for all, it makes everyone richer. Look at the US for example: the richest country in the world, and largely thanks to the enormous international trade in goods and services.
In the short term these developments may cost jobs - in the long term they tend to gain jobs and improve the economy. After all with mechanisation it's the low-end jobs (where little money is made) that are cut, creating more higher-end jobs (where more mon
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It's a painful thing for an overly Nationalistic American to do, but if you look at the history of the Pajaro valley you would see that prior to WWII the Japanese businesses funded the Berry Farming that created such a huge demand for Strawberries. My family's ranch was funded primarily by Japanese investors before FDR stole their property and imprisoned their families.
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Japan has a worse problem than the US - an aging, rather rich population, that is not willing to do boring jobs like picking fruit. In many countries the harvest of crops is a big problem: it needs a lot of temporary, low-paid, hard-working labour.
That means first of all you need sufficient unemployment to have people available in the first place. OK the US has them now, but that's not the point here. Many of those unemployed are far from the farms, or don't want to work there in the first place. Many coun
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They know they're ripe because they turn red at the money spot.
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