
Washington state’s orchards see a game-changer in a robot that picks apples - e15ctr0n
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/agriculture/a-robot-that-picks-apples-washington-states-orchards-could-see-a-game-changer/
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umeshunni
Surprisingly well balanced article that highlights different viewpoints on the
issue:

>> Members of the $7.5 billion annual Washington agriculture industry have
long grappled with labor shortages Human pickers are getting scarce [..]
“Young people do not want to work in farms, and elderly pickers are slowly
retiring.”

>> The work is hard and dangerous, and has long drawn Mexican workers to
central Washington [..] He estimated half the state’s farmworkers are
immigrants who are in the country illegally [..] many of them have settled in
Washington and are productive members of the community

>> ..the industry is deeply interested in alternatives to human labor..

>> The robotic pickers don’t get tired and can work 24 hours a day.

>> “They are scared of losing their jobs to mechanization,” [..] “A robot is
not going to rent a house, buy clothing for their kids, buy food in a grocery
and reinvest that money in the local economy.”

~~~
fludlight
>> “They are scared of losing their jobs to mechanization,” [..] “A robot is
not going to rent a house, buy clothing for their kids, buy food in a grocery
and reinvest that money in the local economy.”

A robot won't do those things, but in the long run the ex-farm workers will
move to urban areas where they'll get jobs, rent houses, buy clothing for
their kids...

That's what happened a century ago when the first wave of mechanization in the
first world began a trend that reduced agricultural employment from >90% of
all jobs to <5%.

Everything will be fine and the everyone's standard of living will rise...in
the long run. In the meantime, let's try to avoid a populist revolution.

~~~
barsonme
> but in the long run the ex-farm workers will move to urban areas where
> they'll get jobs, rent houses, buy clothing for their kids...

Let's take Washington state as an example. Where are the workers going to
move? Seattle? Where rent is ridiculously high? What jobs will they get when
more and more jobs these days require college degrees and manufacturing is
going away?

The job and housing market today is distinctly different from 100 years ago—we
place higher emphasis on schooling and training and many jobs that do not
require some form of schooling don't pay enough to support a family (mostly
because they're not designed to).

Please don't construe my comment as endorsing some sort of populist
revolution. I just find it very hard to believe hordes of migrant workers
(many of which are here illegally, don't speak much English, perhaps have
little schooling, etc.) will just waltz on into cities and out of thin air
procure jobs that pay enough to cover rent, food, and clothing—especially when
they only reason they can support a family on an apple picker's salary of a
couple hundred bucks a day is because they live in the cheapest part of the
state.

I mean, if it was that easy why wouldn't they do it already? Cities offer
vastly more resources for poor folk than central Washington orchards do, so
all they gain from picking apples is familiarity and perhaps the support
network of working with similar people.

~~~
fludlight
The reason I mentioned the long run and a populist revolutionist because it
takes many years for the labor force to adjust. An entire generation that
can't find productive jobs for a decade is a very dangerous thing. This led to
considerable political turmoil in the US in the 1930s. Unfortunately, I see
something similar on the horizon in the service sector.

------
Animats
FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics have been demoing experimental systems for a
while now. Both can pick apples, but both systems are still too slow and not
field-ready yet. There have been working academic demo systems for about five
years [1], but they're slow. Or slow and really complicated.[2]

Robot manipulation in unstructured situations still sucks. It can sort of be
done, but doing it fast enough to be useful remains tough.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk1Yn0aAURA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk1Yn0aAURA)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlaNDm88yZo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlaNDm88yZo)

~~~
a_imho
Why not just shake the tree?
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJqAujx1Oc8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJqAujx1Oc8)

~~~
lithos
Not all apples are for pie and other types of filling.

------
Theodores
I think this video helps:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0coCmXiYU)

As you can see this is some iterations away from being optimal but it is
certainly getting there.

Primates eyes co-evolved with fruit evolving the colour-coded 'I am ready to
eat' system they have to let us know when things are ripe. Imagine if the
fruit picking machine gets to be reasonably aware of what fruits are ripe in
the orchard at a given moment in time and is able to optimally pick fruit for
a given customer, e.g. a sandwich bar chain may want ready to eat fruit
whereas the supermarket may want something that ripens at home. A reasonable
AI system could be trained to do a better job of reading the 'ripe' signals of
fruit and even 'know' that given fruit since it was just a bud on a flower.
Waste could be cut to a minimum if the system was aware of apples ready to go
bad or drop to the floor.

As well as picking there is also the matter of grading the crop, getting it
clean and so on. There is no reason why this machine can't do all of that at
source, so the apple gets washed, blown spotlessly dry with a Dyson style
dryer and then instantly sorted/graded and packed into some 100% nitrogen
packet of some sort, sent to the distribution centre and on the shelves for
lunch the next day.

Hopefully our new robotic overlords in the fields will work from above.
Instead of heavy tractors, plant and people on the ground you could have some
lighter weight equipment strung out from above, a mesh of wires held up by
some massive wind turbine towers, to which the fruit picking machines might
traverse.

McCain Chips are made with robots on the production line that pick out any
defects, again, our fruit picking machines could do this and grade any cleaned
produce as catering grade, nonetheless prepared clean and packed in nitrogen
to prevent any further degradation. A whole new world of better product and
time to market might be possible by handing over the fruit picking bit to the
robots. Apples could even be picked when they got to a 'perfect size/weight'
and not just graded that way, trees could be picked in such a way that all the
fruit attains this 'ideal' which is optimal given inputs.

Such a system would work 24/7 in all seasons, tending the crop one way or
another on a large estate, with some of its robotic arms going places at all
times. You would need a team of maintenance and other support roles to keep
things operational, all requiring a different skill set to the pickers of
today. Their wages would be higher and spent in the local community rather
than sent out of the country.

Orchards need not be so regimented for machines in this brave new world,
orchards could have a mix of trees of all shapes and sizes, with different
land use below, open to people and a proper 'forest floor' for small furry
animals. Fruit in such areas could be expected to be part eaten by bugs but
our robot overlords could also be experts at picking the bugs out to produce
perfectly good fruit for pies and juices.

Rejecting our soon-to-be robot fruit picking machines is like rejecting the
horse drawn plough as it might put the humans that pull ploughs out of
business.

~~~
donarb
There is no optimal picking. Apples you buy in the store can be up to a year
old. Washington apples are picked at harvest time and stored in refrigerated
warehouses to be distributed nationwide throughout the year.

