
Robocrop: world's first raspberry-picking robot set to work - finphil
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/26/world-first-fruit-picking-robot-set-to-work-artificial-intelligence-farming
======
marcus_holmes
I had a summer job picking raspberries on the Isle of Man. It was hard,
boring, work. I left after only a few weeks, and got my first programming job
(the island had a thriving offshore finance industry and no Manx coders).

So I'm ambivalent about this. On the one hand, awesome that yet another crappy
job is being automated. On the other hand, that job literally saved my life -
I was homeless and struggling until that opportunity came along, and it lead
on to a career that has kept me secure ever since.

How do we replace the crappy low-skilled, low-paying jobs that we're
automating, but that also allow people to stay alive while they sort
themselves out?

~~~
neilwilson
You implement a Job Guarantee. The ability to sell your labour to the central
bank at the living wage, who then allocates it to local democracy to use as
local democracy sees fit working for the public good.

After all the 'interest rate targeting' function of the central bank, and the
unelected wonks that run it, is supposed to guarantee full employment. If it
isn't doing so, then those who screwed up should obviously pay the price of
their failure.

That it acts as a powerful targeted automatic stabiliser injecting liquidity
temporally and spatially on demand into local economies in a manner bank
lending could never hope to match is just an added bonus.

~~~
nickles
For anyone unfamiliar, a job guarantee is a proposal of Modern Monetary
Theory. Although the validity of MMT has neither been established nor
disproven explicitly, it relies on, among other things, the ability of a
nation to print its own currency, collect taxes in its own currency, and issue
debt exclusively in its own currency. It is therefore not applicable in all
nations.

> The ability to sell your labour to the central bank at the living wage, who
> then allocates it to local democracy to use as local democracy sees fit
> working for the public good.

How would a central bank determine allocations to various municipalities? This
step necessarily requires discretion on the part of the central bank. Such a
policy would distort the labor market, crowding out private sector employment
and potentially producing malinvestment. It would also increase the power of
the central bank, which is not necessarily desirable if the unelected nature
of central bankers is a concern.

> the 'interest rate targeting' function of the central bank... is supposed to
> guarantee full employment

The Federal Reserve bank has a dual mandate of stable, low inflation and low
unemployment. Central banks in many other countries are mandated only to
maintain stable, low inflation.

> That it acts as a powerful targeted automatic stabiliser

There are other automatic stabilizers that can be implemented independent of
the central bank. In the United States, for example, tax incentives for
employer provided health insurance have a procyclical effect, as decreased
employment during recession causing reduced healthcare expenditures.

> bank lending could never hope to match

Global lending has been distorted since 2008 due to the Federal Reserve's
interest on excess reserves policy. The combination of increased reserve
requirements, increased bank reserves due to the fed's enlarged balance sheet,
and the availability of a risk free return on reserves has reduced the overall
quantity of loans relative to prior trends. Even small, local banks, who would
otherwise like to make loans and are subject to less stringent reserve
requirements, have increased the reserves on hand due to the breakdown of the
federal funds market caused by IOER. It's hard to definitively state that bank
lending is less effective than other policy when it's been hampered by central
bank policy for a decade.

~~~
neilwilson
"It is therefore not applicable in all nations."

It's applicable to all nations. You could have a currency that is specifically
for this job. As long as you remember to tax it out of existence at the other
end.

"This step necessarily requires discretion on the part of the central bank. "

The process in the UK is straightforward. It follows the existing Universal
Credit system. The indidividual presents themselves at the local Job Centre,
the Job Centre signs them up and allocates them as local democracy dictates to
jobs in the area (whether working for local councils, or local charities as
the municipality dictates). The job program signs off timesheets which are
filed with the UC programme, and then the UC is paid - directly by the central
bank. Rather than a 'Treasury' account, you use a 'Job Guarantee' account to
charge the bill to. Other than than the process is the same.

"The Federal Reserve bank has a dual mandate of stable, low inflation and low
unemployment. "

Which it is failing to keep. Central banks without employment targets have
high unemployment - particularly if government is constrained.

"There are other automatic stabilizers that can be implemented independent of
the central bank."

Not and allow a balanced budget provision at the same time.

"Global lending has been distorted since 2008 due to the Federal Reserve's
interest on excess reserves policy"

Without that central interest rates would be zero. The natural rate of
interest is zero in the interbank - as any banker will tell you. Central banks
interfere in the market to raise rates.

Reserves have no control function over bank lending. At all. Ever.

And anyway that misses the point. Bank lending _takes time_ , which as any
student of dynamic systems knows introduces unstable harmonics into the
response function. The reaction is precisely the same as trying to stabilise a
skidding car with a steering wheel. Get too big a skid and you can't counter
it because you can't respond fast enough. Then the car crashes.

------
AngryData
I hate to be a downer but ill believe it when I see it. That robot is big,
bulky, and does not look nimble or fast. A human could have picked a couple
boxes worth of berries in the time it took that robot to decide to pick one
berry. Anybody who has ever picked berries of any kind, be it strawberries or
blueberries or blackberries will tell you, speed is the name of the game and
even the average human versus an experienced picker isn't even a competition.
An experienced picker is going to be grabbing multiple berries at a time with
all of their fingers, not just one at a time. An experienced picker will have
decided which berries to pick next before they even got done putting the ones
they just picked into a basket which only takes a fraction of a second.

You will get far better returns breeding and genetically modifying the plants
to be easier to pick or shake the berries loose than any robot ive ever seen.
Sure, it is technically feasible, but nobody is going to spend a million
dollars on a robot that doesn't pick faster than an experienced human, it
would take multiple decades to pay itself off even if you assumed the power
and maintenance was free.

Maybe in another 10 years it will be worth seriously looking into berry
picking robots again, but berries are literally the hardest and most difficult
fruit for a robot to pick. Uneven ripening, very delicate fruits, tangled
messes of plant vines, very little maneuvering room, ect. It is like trying to
automate a rally car before you are able to automate an oval track race.

~~~
celticninja
They did start with the hardest berries so that it's easier to work backwards
for easier fruit. Also the plan is to hire them out to farmers at a price per
kilo picked,which is aimed at less than the cost of a human.

------
ComodoHacker
I genuinely expected Raspberry Pi inside.

~~~
taneq
I'm sure one of the end products will include pie.

------
whazor
Hearing my dad talk in the past about machine designs to automate both tomato
and strawberry machines. He recommends cutting the stalk with either a laser
or a scissor. This is significantly faster than trying to pick a vulnerable
fruit.

~~~
pedrocr
If you do that with raspberries then you need to have people process the fruit
again as they're sold without stems. Tomatoes and strawberries are sold with
stems as they don't detach without cutting. Don't know what the effect would
be, commercially and in terms of preservation, of selling raspberries with
stems.

~~~
fiblye
I think if robotically trimmed fruits with stems sold for 10% cheaper than
slow picked stemless fruits, there'd be no market left for stemless by the
time the season is over.

~~~
pedrocr
If selling with stems works fine, no doubt. But raspberries detach from stems
as they mature so you may end up with a messy box after a while. Or maybe this
is just done because it's easy to pick manually by grabbing the fruit and
picking with stems works as well. I'll have to try picking some with stems and
see what happens.

~~~
whatshisface
> _raspberries detach from stems as they mature_

If the problem can be reduced to separating objects of different
characteristics from a process flow, existing food processing techniques like
vibrating belts and air guns can handle it, no need for robot arms.

~~~
pedrocr
Ripe raspberries are very delicate. Some of these small fruits are sometimes
picked directly into the final retail boxes to minimize handling. I don't know
if you can apply those methods if you're not then processing the fruit further
into jams or juices.

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jlj
Imagining if robots can pick raspberries at leak ripeness, in the near future
one machine can do the same for all crops, plus weeding. This seems more
economically viable than the current monoculture and chemical based
approaches.

And if one field can support a wider array of crops, they can produce more for
local consumption, and lower transportation distances and costs.

~~~
stefan_
You can not mix a bunch of random crops in one field. This is such a HN
comment.

~~~
inawarminister
Well you can, permaculture advocates do that but it's not viable for
industrial agriculture yet, if ever.

Of course, by random I mean specific crops chosen for their compability to
each other...

[0]
[https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-...](https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/permaculture/permaculture-
design-principles/9-diversity/) (I really like that image of corns, beans, and
squash together from traditional Mesoamerican farming)

------
ptah
> "Analysts attribute this lack of economic efficiency to a shift towards more
> low-skilled jobs since the financial crisis, a lack of business investment
> and a decade of austerity."

Stopping austerity would help then?

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Maximus9000
"worlds first" seems to be a misnomer here. There are machines for tractors
that can pick raspberries. The machine works by shaking the entire raspberry
bush and collecting the berries that fall.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOG85YtZhII](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOG85YtZhII)

~~~
benj111
I suspect that damages a very large proportion of fruit, so either yield ends
up being terrifically low, or its only suitable for jam.

I suppose you could be pedantic and point out it isn't actually _picking_.

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prepend
The whole time I expected it to just smash the berry. This would fit into the
“one day this will be neat” vibe.

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serf
dynamixel servos are a ton of fun to play with, if you ever have the chance.

(the robot featured seems to be using MX-64T's on the wrist)

------
Pigback
No Raspberry Pi inside?

------
packet_nerd
> The world's first raspberry-picking robot

The majority of raspberries are harvested by machine and have been for
decades. Handpicking is only necessary for high quality fresh berries.

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iandanforth
3D printed parts and dynamixel servos do not inspire confidence.

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yummypaint
It picks ~700 per day at most, not counting acquisition and repositioning time
for finding a new fruit. Article is intentionally misleading, video is a waste
of time.

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cairo_x
For the cost and maintenance of the machine over a year, you could probably
exploit backpackers for--in my expert estimation--approximately one billion
years.

------
baylearn
I'll believe it when I see a video of the “final version”.

Until then it's just like any other flaky and slow robot grasper demos out
there trained using various flaky deep reinforcement learning algorithms.

------
SmooL
As mentioned, the "25k/day" is for a future model in 2020. According to a
linked video in the article, a human does about 10k/day.

I believe that right now we're at the very start of this. Robots were supposed
to come for all our manual labor jobs years ago, but they never did, because
if it's not a pure assembly line environment, robots can't cope with the
uncertainty. Research in robotics is increasing and getting places fast,
largely due to advances in reinforcement learning.

I give it another 2 or 3 years until we have a robot hand with a camera that
acts as dexterous and capable as a human hand. Once we have that, tons of
opportunities like this raspberry picking are open for automation.

~~~
PostOnce
"I give it another 2 or 3 years until we have a robot hand with a camera that
acts as dexterous and capable as a human hand."

-some guy, circa 1975

~~~
varjag
The original 1958 AI proposal was expecting to crack it over a summer
hackathon.

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awakeasleep
blogspam for [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/26/world-
fir...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/26/world-first-fruit-
picking-robot-set-to-work-artificial-intelligence-farming)

Also the title is bombastic, 25k/day is what they expect to be able to build
by 2020

~~~
Animats
Yes. This is an academic prototype. And it's really, really slow.[1]

There are much better robotic fruit pickers.[2][3]. And the commercial ones
that do this entirely by mechanical means.[4]

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFemWAXx-3I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFemWAXx-3I)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaL3UxUclKY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaL3UxUclKY)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3SGScaShhw)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt73GOk4JRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt73GOk4JRY)

~~~
contingencies
1 = Raspberries outdoor. Camera and two-finger gripper + pull.

2 = Apples outdoor. Camera and three-finger gripper + twist + pull

3 = Strawberries indoor/outdoor. Camera and two-finger gripper + pull.

4 = Blueberries + raspberries outdoor. Multiple general agitator designs +
fall. (see
[https://youtu.be/bt73GOk4JRY?t=100](https://youtu.be/bt73GOk4JRY?t=100))

I think the fourth is the only honestly commercially viable option. However,
it's never going to work with most fruit, because it relies upon general
agitation to disconnect the fruit.

Additionally, all of the solutions require neatly cropped rows. Whereas, the
promise of robotics is that it will allow intercropping which creates more
productive land with a stronger and more natural ecosystem, reducing outlays
on pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer and related labour and increasing
effective crop density and land use. None of these solutions even touch on
these very real opportunities.

FWIW, I am personally confident that my R&D team (who normally work on food
production and packaging robotics) could produce a functionally superior
prototype to the OP video in a matter of weeks, for a fraction of the budget.

------
notacoward
So much for the HNer who confidently claimed that robots wouldn't be doing
this kind of work any time soon, and used that as the basis for flaming me.

------
amelius
With the current state of deep learning, this kind of application is so easy
to make, it could be a science fair project.

------
hevi_jos
We used to call this "vaporware".

Certainly with my own robots I can pick raspberrys much faster and better than
those guys can currently do.

This thing is extremely slow. I am wondering what kind of engineering those
people have used for it to be so slow. Probably they are using java or python
or mathlab code, instead of using things like C, shaders and FPGA code,
expecting the creation of this low level code to be the "easy" part(in the
future of course).

From my experience, your greatest advantage is the ability to master those low
level technologies. It has to be designed around this technologies and not as
an after thought like this project looks.

~~~
fiblye
As someone working in automation, I don't think the real bottleneck here would
be python. It seems more like it's waiting for accurate sensor input and
trying to properly position itself. Slight mechanical imperfections with a
delicate fruit like a raspberry means disaster, while a machine like this
could probably recognize and tug apples off a tree without any delay.

