Startup Testing Mobile Farmbots 243
An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports on Harvest Automation, a Massachusetts company developing small robots that can perform basic agricultural labor. The ones currently being tested in greenhouses and plant nurseries are 'knee-high, wheeled machines.' 'Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what's around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Key to making the robots flexible and cost-effective is designing them to work only with information provided by their sensors. They don't construct a global map of their environment, and they don't use GPS. The robots have sensors that detect boundary markers, a laser range finder to detect objects in front of them, and a gyroscope for navigating by dead reckoning. The robots determine how far they've traveled by keeping track of wheel rotations.'"
Visions (Score:5, Interesting)
of Silent Running come to mind
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Yes I suppose the time will come when people who need surgery will just download the appropriate software into their gardener and press start.
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of Silent Running come to mind
Robot suits powered by midget actors?
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Damn! Beat me to it! lol.
Hook it up to Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
If you need a bit better pattern recognition or control there's thousands of people willing to do farming from their PCs for free.
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Speaking of pattern recognition, did anyone else read "fembots"?
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Yeah, me too, then I came in here to see if I wasn't the only one!
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If you need a bit better pattern recognition or control there's thousands of people willing to do farming from their PCs for free.
Farmville?
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Very interesting idea! Might be tough on the veggies while folks learn though. Maybe a mandatory training course?
The first few levels are virtual, but at some point the user's proficiency reaches a threshold, and they start moving actual plants. No need to tell them that though.
This is obviously the future (Score:5, Interesting)
The efficiency of farming (yield value per area+inputs) is going to have to grow a lot as global population increases and gets richer. This is obviously one step in that direction. Sure, this robot is laughably primitive compared to Google's self-driving car, but future generations will do better. I think that in 20 years, we'll be able to intersperse multiple simultaneous crops in the same field, which is good for the soil, reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticide, and generates a more value.
The most important reason why we don't see this sort of farming on a large scale is because it requires much more fine-motor work and is incompatible with the machines we use today. But once those machines get substantially cheaper and more dexterous than people, I think we'll make this transition. Our food will be better for it, and there will be more of it. I don't think that this is very far off in the future.
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I envision a design more akin to those cargo-container gantry cranes they use at ports. With multiple arms hanging below the chassis to tend to tasks. That way the bulk of the robot can be above the plants, with the slim supports/wheels being able to navigate in-between rows of plants.
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Re:This is obviously the future (Score:4)
I'm a bit concerned about all of this advancement to support extended population growth. My gut feeling is that we are just setting up ourselves for a big fall the more we detach ourselves from nature. Like a house of cards. It can only go so high before the entire system collapses. It's just a matter of when. For example, a high-altitude nuclear warhead my never cause bodily harm. But the EMP it releases is enough to shutdown entire nations with all microchips fried. That means no transportation and running water. Within weeks, people start dieing and bodies decomposing where they last crawled for survival. Truly scary stuff.
I hate to be the one to break it to you, but we are way past that point already. Modern farm equipment has more electronics than your car does. These would just be a bit of icing on the cake.
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Look dude, I feel the same way. I'm less than 10 miles from NYC and if any bad shit did happen, my hometown would probably get caught in the blast. I'm also very keenly aware of how easily our infrastructure could go to shit on a local, statewide, national, or global scale.
The best defense against this is knowledge. You're posting on a website dedicating to nerds - people who implicitly have a love for knowledge. When you have a concern that something bad is going to happen, you prepare for it. We back up o
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The problem the OP points out is not going to be solved by knowing how to hunt and fish.
The problem is that you can cripple our ability to feed 7 billion people without at all reducing the number of people. You can go into the woods and hunt a deer, but so can a million other people, which means that in two weeks after the stores run out of food there won't be any deer left to hunt.
But there are obvious government-level solutions to problems like this. You just create a "strategic food reserve" of nonperish
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A remarkable amount of equipment doesn't use microchips or can have delicate controls bypassed, though it would make good sense to have a "combat bypass" control option (and spare boxes) just in case.
EMP creates surges by passing fields over POWER LINES. That won't do squat to disconnected spare parts.
EMP is not guaranteed to knock out all circuitry, and much equipment such as diesels with mechanical controls will still be running. Points ignitions and simple electronic ignitions will run, so millions of en
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Of course . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
. . . while the tundra is warming (and turning into swamps, not arable farmland), the vast subtropical regions where most of the world's population lives will be subject to desertification and/or devastating storms.
Harsh winters are GOOD for agriculture. They stir up the soil and kill off insects and weeds. We'll be getting fewer of those hard winters as things warm up.
Robot farmhands are nice for societies with lots of excess wealth. Don't expect them to save our asses.
Re:This is obviously the future (Score:4, Interesting)
Soil degrades if you don't mix your crops over time, but it's not a process that would "leach" from one small plot to it's neighbour. As long as crops are rotated annually, you're good to go. Bigger machines are more efficient at harvesting. Having multiple crop types also means needing multiple machine types, adding to expense.
As far as I know, small plots were only used for family produce by the old family farms, but the bulk of the land was turned over quarter by quarter to specific crops. Things may be different in vegetable or fruit farms/orchards, but we don't really have those in Saskatchewan.
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The Saskatchewan fruit industry http://www.saskfruit.com/ [saskfruit.com] would benefit greatly by this.
List of fruit grown in Saskatchewan http://www.saskfruit.com/modules.php?name=Sections&sop=viewarticle&artid=16 [saskfruit.com]
Now I need to find some Saskatoon berries. Which are grown in the area. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelanchier_alnifolia [wikipedia.org]
Re:This is obviously the future (Score:5, Insightful)
The efficiency of farming (yield value per area+inputs) is going to have to grow a lot as global population increases and gets richer
Not necessarily. Using the most modern farming techniques, we produce far more food than the population that grows it actually requires. The problem is, the areas that have the largest (and most quickly growing) populations, are the areas that use the least effective farming techniques.
Apart from stopping the wars that suck up their manpower, and pillage their crops, getting modern farming in widespread use in the third world is the big step to combating world hunger. And if the pattern is anything like what we've seen, once their standard of living is raised, they stop having as many children, and population will taper off. Much of the western world (US and Australia I know for sure) is currently at below-replacement levels of reproduction.
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Not necessarily. Using the most modern farming techniques, we produce far more food than the population that grows it actually requires. The problem is, the areas that have the largest (and most quickly growing) populations, are the areas that use the least effective farming techniques.
The problem is waste in the developed world. We already produce more than enough food to feed everybody on the planet. But half of what is produced for Europe and the US is thrown out before it even reaches the consumer. Meanwhile our food is still so cheap that the sustenance farmer in Africa cannot compete. It's not that his farming techniques are not effective enough, it's that our industrialized food production is much cheaper and he can't sell his crop. He loses his livelihood and now the nation is dep
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Why is it laughable primitive?
I'll bet you any amount that the google car would be unable to do what that robot does; doesn't that make the google robot laughable primitive at farming?
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Utilizing solar power for the plant-tending machinery sounds like a good idea, at first... then you realize that plants themselves are solar powered, and therefore every square meter you are devoting to powering the machinery is a reduction of the potential plant-matter production. A possible semi-alternative might be to make the roofs of all homes into solar arrays, thus providing shelter and power simultaneously - of course, the occupants of those dwellings may not want to give up the electricity this wou
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Runaway (Score:3)
And visions of Tom Selleck shooting our garden tending overlords appear in my mind....
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Will they run on 8086 CPUs?
Picture with their handler (Score:5, Informative)
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Much room for farm bots (Score:4, Insightful)
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Interestingly enough, apples (and I assume other fruits) have been harvested using machinery for decades, at least. I recall a trip to an apple orchard when I was in elementary school (nearly 30 years ago) where they showed us the equipment - in essence, they slung a tarp beneath the tree, and a big motor with a giant rubber band wrapped around itself and the tree shook the tree to make the apples fall.
Sounds like something out of a cartoon, when I describe it like that...
This is needed like 10 years ago (Score:5, Insightful)
The only real way to save the west, and ultimately, the world, is to automate. In particular, food should be automated. Right now, less than 2% of American labor goes into Ag. One of the bigger issues is that we now import a lot of food. But we increasingly import shrimp from farms in South America and Asia. How bad are these? HORRIBLE. Both use loads of anti-biotics. IN addition, they do it not in isolated ponds, but along the shoreline. THis is some of the most important areas on the earth, and it is being destroyed to send sickly shrimp to the west. Insane.
Likewise, we get loads of food from China. Hell, Nestle is now producing candy in China. SICK. At this time, upper middle class Chinese buy food from USA, Canada, Australia, and EU. Why? Because they know that the good that is coming from China is loaded with mercury, lead, and many other pollutants. And this is happening again, because China is cheating, and companies like Nestle are greedy as all hell.
Ever been on a Chinese commercial fishing boat? I have talked to a fishery person that was working on one to make certain that China was not stealing or mis-labelling. She was telling afterwards that she no longer eats fish unless it is from USA, Canada, EU, UK, or Japan. She tells me that China was the worst. Disgusting conditions.
Robotics will solve a lot of these issues. We can grow our own shrimp here cheaper than importing them. Likewise, the same is true of veggies, fish, etc.
It is time for America, and the west, to take a stand and say enough is enough. We need to quit backing those that pollute and destroy our planet. Time to put a tax on all goods based on pollution from where they come from.
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Now, why do these illegals come to America (and canada, EU, UK, and Australia)?
Hardly at all in Australia because our border is pretty much impossible to cross. If there was a land bridge to Indonesia it would be a different story. Though I should point out that I know this guy, a civil engineer, from Malaysia who moved here recently and got a job inspecting tilt up concrete slabs. Workers are paid below the legal minimum and don't seem to get their benefits. Many of them may not have work visas. So there is a grey labor market here but its not not as overt as it is in the US. My one
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That resources boom is pushing up the value of the aussie dollar and threatening to move my engineering job to Europe. Ending it would give me job security.
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lots of illegals in Australia, but we only care about those that come by boat, the backpackers and students that over stay visas and work on farms are tolerated, wtf?
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lots of illegals in Australia, but we only care about those that come by boat, the backpackers and students that over stay visas and work on farms are tolerated, wtf?
Illegals in Australia are small in number because of our oceanic border. Its not that they are tolerated, just that there aren't many of them.
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The problem is that western levels of goods, count on taxes being paid as well as re-investment in the local economy. As such illegals who work in the nation, but then send the money out of the nation, are just as bad as those that outsource to China [...]
What makes you think illegal immigrants don't pay taxes?
If they're being paid above the table, the IRS takes its bite of their paycheck before they ever touch it.
And illegals generally don't collect social security, disability, worker's comp, or anything else that's deducted from their checks.
Good or bad, our agricultural system is built on having a steady influx of (il)legal immigrants from South America do our dirty work.
The States that pushed out immigrants found themselves fucked when their crops starte
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now that's a new, illegals paying taxes. as someone from finland I just assumed that they didn't, because uh, you need to be legal to pay taxes, have social security number and all that.
I just assumed they were paid under the table, but this way the employer doesn't need to care about that they're illegals?
around here there's this bigger problem of outsourcing manual labor to out of country companies(company a buys construction from company b, company b then buys the construction from company c which is a p
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About those shrimp:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/business/simple-innovation-is-often-the-most-successful-prototype.html [nytimes.com]
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From the title (Score:2)
Huey, Dewie, and Louie (Score:2)
I'm just throwing this out there for the other five people that have seen this movie and know what I am talking about.
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Not the young ones obviously. But I think the more obvious reference is star wars. I imagine C3PO roaming an Australian cattle station ambushing cows and annoying them into going in for muster.
Probably better for a more controlled environment. (Score:2)
The big thing in this type of scenario I think that would still require the "human touch" so to speak would be harvesting. You could probably handle that with video recognition and soft grippers but there's still a chance of damaging the plant while picking the fruit/vegetable.
Farms are already automated. (Score:2)
A lot of harvesting is already largely automated; this article's "new thing" is pre-harvest agricultural automation - specifically, using 'bots to plant stuff (or at least place seedlings and potted plants). Perhaps the foodstuffs you're describing won't be able to be automated (yet), but if it comes right down to it, we can grow our own tomatoes, melons, and squash to supplement the mass-produced (read: automated) foodstuffs like grains and tree-borne fruit. If bots can plant seeds, other bots can water/fe
Vertical gardens (Score:2)
That is nice, but I like the idea of vertical farming [omegagarden.com], a good solution for countries in the northern hemisphere where you can't grow anything outdoors between October to May. With vertical gardens you can grow inside hangars or even in standard size containers during cold period.
I should contact them. (Score:2)
Hoe-bots, not ro-bots... (Score:2)
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Re:If these have the impact of the "cotton gin"... (Score:5, Informative)
From my hazy recollection of American history, the cotton (en)gin(e), made it possible to process cotton with a lot less labor making slaves less necessary(?) and set the stage for the civil war. Or something like that.
The general idea of your post may be correct, but I think it's the opposite. The cotton gin made slaves more necessary to the south (or at least so they believed) because it made seed-heavy cotton varieties into a viable crop. This cotton would grow well where other crops didn't. Without the gin, the plant wouldn't have been economical and slavery would have continued to gradually fade. Some of this is conjecture, it's hard to speculate accurately on possible alternative paths of history, but slavery was supposedly declining before the cotton gin was made available.
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... the cotton (en)gin(e), made it possible to process cotton with a lot less labor making slaves less necessary(?)
Nope. By reducing the necessary labor, the cotton gin made the cotton business far more profitable, thus increasing the demand for slaves to grow and harvest the cotton.
Agricultural robots may have a similar effect. By making labor intensive crops (strawberries, fruit, vegetables, etc.) more profitable, production will shift in that direction instead of crops like grain that require little labor. But since not all tasks can be easily automated, the demand for human farm labor may go up instead of down.
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Like slavery, society is growing less tolerant of the current situation of illegal labor. Though different people have different reasons for it, a large number of people will not tolerate the situation continuing as is. Some people are feeling this desire for change and are looking for other answers and these type of robots might be one of them. Either way, we're in the beginning of a new era where there are far more people to do labor than there is need for labor. Our next great challenge will be how
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We need to modify HR2885 to be a bit stronger, as well as add a modified dream act
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<URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-alabamas-immigration-law-is-crippling-its-farms/2011/11/01/gIQAg0JvjM_story.html>
<URL:http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/makingsense_10-28.html>
<URL:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/21/after-alabama-immigration-law-few-americans-taking-immigrants-work_n_1023635.html>
http
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Simply outsourcing will only serve to destroy the west
Sadly enough, I'm considering moving to India so I can get a job in the IT field in the US market.
I wish I were joking.
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No, and one advantage is keeping "Third World" workers OUT of modern countries.
Like it or not, exclusivity protects economic advantage.
Get rid of the need for cheap labor (which exclusively comes from "less accomplished" humans) and you can keep such humans from burdening your society.
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We were told we need to go to school and get our degrees in order to avoid ending in a dead end job mowing lawns or flipping burgers. Now we're out of school, with degrees, with no jobs for us, and we're berated and jeered at because we refuse to flip burgers and mow lawns.
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Re:Let 3rd world workers do it instead (Score:4, Insightful)
And it wasn't that long ago (just a generation or two) that our kids did all the same work that illegals do today. Every kid had a summer job, on the farm or in some related capacity.
I've sometimes thought that a required period of such labour (perhaps earning college money in escrow) would put a different perspective into the heads of today's youth.
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That too :/
Doesn't Israel still have a requirement for national service?
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we're out of school, with degrees, with no jobs for us
What kind of degrees?
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Now we're out of school, with degrees, with no jobs for us, and we're berated and jeered at because we refuse to flip burgers and mow lawns.
I will refer you to this [cracked.com], which I saw on reddit the other day. It is interesting.
Also, I attribute the economic pain we are feeling now on the effects of the world slowly approaches an "average" standard of living. So as the very large third world get a slightly bit richer, the very small first world must get a LOT poorer.
So the "I did everything I was told, I have a college degree, and I demand to stay at my childhood standard of living" argument is valid, but simply not going to happen. In a world of lim
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They'd, though, rather demand a government check for doing nothing.
Citation badly needed.
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I and members of my family *see* families who have been on welfare since the 1980s, and who's large front yard barbecues indicate a distinct lack of physical and mental disability.
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Re:This would solve... (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, something like this can't really take off precisely because of cheap labor. Cheap bots will only be capable of limited tasks while requiring close supervision, and expensive ones will cost much more than a minimum wage laborer.
Not too long ago I was looking into what it would cost to build a (nearly) fully automated greenhouse. The problem is, no matter how efficient or clever your system is, you simply cannot compete with the cost of human labor at the very bottom of the skills spectrum.
It is frustrating, because it seems like we should automate the more basic and repetitive tasks first, but in a market based economy, is simply isn't, well, economical.
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The problem is, no matter how efficient or clever your system is, you simply cannot compete with the cost of human labor at the very bottom of the skills spectrum.
Completely true. When the "cost" of a human is perhaps a few hundred dollars, beneficial technologies wither on the vine as our living standards fall trying to "compete". That is exactly what we are witnessing right now -- a race to the bottom.
in a market based economy, is simply isn't, well, economical.
A market economy can't exist without sensible government regulation of negative externalities. Immigrants are a negative externality. The US government has completely failed to regulate it.
Re:This would solve... (Score:5, Insightful)
Humans consume resources. If you're concerned about limited resources, you should be concerned with limiting human population growth. Hiring immigrants does exactly the opposite -- it subsidizes population growth and provides a "relief valve" for failed governments.
I'll repeat that for you in case you missed it. Welcoming immigrants simply perpetuates the poverty and the oppressive governments you seem to be so concerned about.
Walling most of them out would absolutely make us more prosperous, because we have more resources per capita than anywhere on Earth. In the long run it would make them more prosperous as well.
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I always seem to have mod points - but not today. Benjamin certainly deserves some mod points. Unfortunately - some fool or another will probably mod him (and me) down, because they believe us to be xenophobic, and/or prejudiced. Phhht.
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Depends on the farm. A smaller farm owned by a family might be best off with some bots like this, assuming a reasonable price. Hiring people is expensive. Employee theft, insurance needed for lawsuits, payroll taxes, hiring supervisors, dealing with unemployment claims, etc. Large farms have the infrastructure for this. Smaller family farms are better served by dealing with getting something mechanical/electronic working that can do a basic job well.
I've been seeing this with some crops. An acquaintan
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A little secret about those GPS tractors that you didn't hit on:
They work out the most efficient plowing, planting, and harvesting routes, as well. If you or I climbed on a tractor, we would just drive from end to end of the field, only varying our course for a tree or something. The GPS guided tractor maps out every single pass, before it ever starts. The result is a modest increase in crop yield. I emphasize "modest" - but if a farmer realizes a 3% increase in crop yield, with the very same investment
Re:This would solve... (Score:4, Funny)
Not too long ago I was looking into what it would cost to build a (nearly) fully automated greenhouse. The problem is, no matter how efficient or clever your system is, you simply cannot compete with the cost of human labor at the very bottom of the skills spectrum.
That's easy enough to fix. Just have the workers unionize. That will triple the cost of your human labor right there and then your robots become cost effective.
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How about doing the disease monitoring yourself in the first incarnation? A high quality webcam mounted on one of the bots would do the trick wouldn't it? You could just take a look once a week to ensure that nothing has gone disastrously wrong. I've never tried doing robotic vision processing before, but looking for certain colours of disease spots or green flies or whatever shouldn't be that hard either. Also you could have the bots notify you when things look drastically different to the previous day/6 h
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"expensive ones will cost much more than a minimum wage laborer."
And of course the whole point of illegals is you don't have to pay them minimum wage.
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Build hydroponic beds in layers a hundred feet hi
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I think that you err, in your assumptions about the job market. The automotive industry managed to replace tens of thousands of workers with dumb-bots, decades ago. And, these bots don't sound especially "smart". Face it - it doesn't take much processing power to evaluate a cucumber's readiness for harvest, or the myriad of other tasks involved in agriculture.
The sensors, software, and hardware are so cheap today, that even a pretty poor person can construct a bot to perform such simple tasks. Once the
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"Actually, something like this can't really take off precisely because of cheap labor."
Boot the cheap labor back to its countries of origin and that can kickstart the process. Agricultural labor is a job for machines, and if the machines aren't quite there yet that doesn't mean they won't be.
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Agreed, these bot farm workers _need_ an electrified fence.
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I was thinking more Neil Young [metrolyrics.com]
in the past worker jammed up the works in the new (Score:2)
and so it begins... the complete elimination of human labor by the upper classes. So once agriculture and mining are completely automated (and they will be, just wait until we have robots to haul off broken/malfunctioning ones for recycle/repair.) and they've automated all manufacturing (see Foxconn in China) How long will it take for people to get fedup with 1% of the population controlling all the resources leaving everyone else with nothing? If food, mineral and energy production can all be automated why should any of us have to work to live? I'm sure someone will come up with some religious/moral BS as to why we should work. There needs to be a societal overhaul if these technologies do end up being viable. Communism didn't work when you had to wait 5 years to get a car, but if that same car can be built in 30 mins by robots, using resources mined by robots, should anyone really have to go without a car?
in the past workers jammed up the works in the new Machines and hackers will be a big risk.
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See, this is the problem. A human can milk a cow within about 15 minutes.
After 9 1/2 years or so of being robo-milked, a typical cow is udderly exhausted.
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Where's my flying car? No, this one [terrafugia.com] doesn't count.
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An example? Most if the farmers I recall in his stories were real human people.
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That may be true, but then, Mexicans get paid more than 2 bucks a day. Fortunately for everyone, businesses sitting down to do the math eliminate such ridiculous hyperbole from the word "Go."
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I don't get this bit, the robots have laser rangefinders but no GPS, when a GPS chip is 10$ if mass purchased? And an xbee module would be 10$ more, so you can mass control them... Something doesn't add up here...
and cameras on the roof of the greenhouse 20bucks a piece, blinking serial indicators to show which bot is which 2 bucks per robot.
I guess the cost efficiency comes from not needing server software. maybe they got quotes from some expensive warehouse monitoring company on how much that costs..