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).
> 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.
Nope, it's a technological issue. Increasing immigration might address some of the symptoms of the issue, but it does nothing to address that a human being still needs to do this labor. Frankly even if you were to liberalize immigration laws, convincing people to upend their lives and move to a high cost of living country where cultural integration is difficult at best just to pick tomatoes is not exactly a trivial task. Even if you do get people to come for menial labor, as you say there are plenty of other areas like healthcare where labor is in high demand, so you're likely still going to be faced with labor shortages in less desirable fields. Immigration is a treatment, automation is a cure.
"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?
They're called "processing tomatoes" and it's a very interesting crop and industry. Bred for a narrow ripening window, to be machine harvestable, and shippable in massive bulk.
"Robots will automatically harvest tomatoes that are easy to pick, while humans will handle the more challenging fruits."
this is EXACTLY the oposite of the way it is supposed to work, and brings to mind agricultural sayings concerning greed and taking unfair advantage, "taking the low hanging fruit", and "cherry picking"
with the blame of "inefficiency" going to fall on the plants, and a bigger push to breed "robot friendly" crops
or no doubt "cant we just print this shit?"
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[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadThis 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...
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?
https://ctga.org/tomato-facts/
Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxF3Ok6Uf64
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnyfX4LcAfU
Harder parts are the watering, because that's the part which is always broken. Dutch company.
And detecting diseases. Which is the harder AI part my company is doing.
Moving the heavy robot around is also not that easy, esp. with the cheap dutch robots.