
Robots are not very good at picking strawberries yet - CrocodileStreet
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/20/592857197/robots-are-trying-to-pick-strawberries-so-far-theyre-not-very-good-at-it
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Animats
Agrobot has a better strawberry picking robot in test. [1] Abundant Robotics
has an apple picking robot in test. Not yet in production. Getting close,
though.

Robotic weeding is now commercially available. Vision systems target the
weeds, skipping the wanted plants. The weed is hit with an overdose of
fertilizer, a laser, or just a powered hammer. Deere and Siemens both have
machines for this.

It's coming soon. A cell phone has enough compute power for this.

[1] [https://www.wsj.com/video/agrobot-automates-the-work-of-
berr...](https://www.wsj.com/video/agrobot-automates-the-work-of-berry-
harvesting/D07A91E8-C453-4652-8ECE-2229FB862F6E.html)

~~~
Qworg
Does Agrobot do well in standard fields? It looks like the testbed is a very
fancy raised bed system.

Is the Abundant Robotics robot faster now?

~~~
jdmichal
Strawberries are typically grown in somewhat raised beds, even if it's not as
fancy as the pictures I'm seeing with the Agrobot. This is what a typically
strawberry field around Plant City, FL looks like:

[https://www.adrianasbestrecipes.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/...](https://www.adrianasbestrecipes.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/04/Strawberry-Field.jpg)

~~~
Qworg
Certainly! I lived in Plant City for about 3 years.

That's still a nice design - many are just mounded earth.

~~~
jdmichal
Ah, apologies then. You probably know more about it than I do. I just show up
for the Strawberry Festival every year!

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m-i-l
Rather that developing robots that fit into existing strawberry farms which
are designed to make it easier for humans to harvest, they should be
developing new types of strawberry farms which are designed to make it easier
for robots to harvest. That could be combined with the indoor farm model too
to bring other benefits, such as allowing all-year-round harvests, potentially
bringing the food closer to the consumer, possibly assisting pest control,
etc.

But yes, I've often thought strawberry harvesting would be a really
interesting (and challenging) AI and robotics problem to work on.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>existing strawberry farms which are designed to make it easier for humans to
harvest //

All the farms I've seen in the UK have just been fields, making harvesting
very arduous work (that farms near where I grew up imported Eastern European
labourers for).

What's the design you're talking of here?

~~~
jdietrich
A large proportion of strawberries are now produced in polytunnels using the
matted bed or table top system. The former allows strawberries to be picked
from a seated position from a wheeled trolley; the latter raises the
strawberries to about chest height. Gross yields can be slightly lower and
there's a significant capital cost for table top production, but it can work
out cheaper overall due to easier organic pest control, higher quality and
reduced husbandry and picking costs. We're likely to see a considerable shift
towards table top production as brexit starts to bite.

------
forkLding
Automation on farms would be a necessary move, its back-breaking work that you
don't get to experience that is totally different from the u-pick experiences,
they grow bushes very small (at about 1/8th the size of bushes you see in
movies) with lots of fruits so that the bushes mature very early and need
minimal space, all of which make picking it up very tiring, generally speaking
the only people picking with me are either very nice "immigrants" or people I
wouldnt want to walk home in the night with.

I once did it for some quick cash during my pre-highschool yrs, I quit very
fast cos it makes much more sense just to wait tables for the same amount of
money.

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NathanWilliams
I find it amazing that with all the progress around us every day, people still
think there is an impossible line automation can’t cross, and that their job
is safe.

Even as a programmer, I imagine a lot of coding work being at the minimum
offset by automation.

~~~
coldtea
> _I find it amazing that with all the progress around us every day, people
> still think there is an impossible line automation can’t cross, and that
> their job is safe._

Why don't have any contracts signed with nature on infinite progress. Or that
any desired progress will be timely.

We might never be able to pass some local maxima.

Or we might go extinct, or go back to barbarism after a few good wars of
famines, before we get to solve some problems.

Or it might take 50 or 100 years in the future to do so.

We still don't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants, flying cars,
space colonies, or general AI -- all things that were considered (by experts
nonetheless) "just around the corner" in the 60s.

And don't get me started on mass market holographic storage and memsistors...

~~~
onion2k
_We still don 't have personal robot (with bodies) assistants..._

The vision of a having a robot assistant just shows the lack of imagination
that people in the 1960s who were making these predictions. They couldn't see
further than a mechanised version of what they already had. On the face of it
a robot is a replacement for a physical person, but the reality is that the
physical person bit is what's unnecessary. Automation of processes is largely
about removing as much of the 'physical' bit as possible. What was needed was
to distill the tasks down to the absolute minimum and then automate that, and
that's what we've got now. We automated the physical side of posting a letter
and now we have email. We automated filing by using databases instead.
Scheduling meetings is now done using shared calendars.

Automation of jobs is not about making a machine that does the job of a
person. It's about removing the person and building systems to replace the
processes that person did.

We do have robot assistants. They just don't look like robots.

~~~
coldtea
> _The vision of a having a robot assistant just shows the lack of imagination
> that people in the 1960s who were making these predictions. They couldn 't
> see further than a mechanised version of what they already had._

I'm not so sure. A robot assistant would be very much desired by thousands, as
a general replacement for another human (e.g. domestic server, personal
trainer, bud to play tennis with, arbitrary help around the house, and don't
get my started on sexbots).

>* Automation of processes is largely about removing as much of the 'physical'
bit as possible.*

That might be so, but humans are not factories, and a nice general help
anthropomorphic robot would still be very much appreciated. The same way
general AI is the holy grail considered to 10000 dedicated processors that can
play chess or translate for you.

------
ThomPete
_" You could afford to give people a day off, you know. Afternoons off,
holidays off. If you have machines behind you."_

One of the major issues I have with discussions around automation is that they
always look at it from either the point of economics or the point of
technology.

Those are important perspectives but we tend to look back in history to
determine what will happen in the future.

If technology keeps progressing and economics keep making it cheaper and
cheaper to do more then the real question is where does that really leave
humans. Our advances as a species is by the invention of new technologies
which has allowed us to store more and more knowledge/information/data from
trial and error in the past while at the same time allowed us to spend less
and less time on surviving. In other words, human ingenuity and advances are
based on the technology.

What many seem to forget is that once AI learn to pick strawberries it has
learned a lot of other things too which can be applied to other
industries/tasks and it's instantly applicable (no need to retrain workforce).
In other words each step forward isn't isolated to the area that the AI is
learning about it allows for the advance of technology in a number of areas.

And so here is the problem.

Human progress has historically followed the progress of technology which was
fine as long as it made many things easier. Human ingenuity helped us keep
adapting and venture into new areas. But what we are increasingly facing is
technological ingenuity.

A good example of that is:
[https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6368815...](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6368815224174231553)

In other words, the one thing we had over technology doesn't even seem to be
out of it's reach cause while technology is progressing we aren't.

~~~
dzdt
Where does it leave humans? In about the same position as horses when the
internal combustion engine started to become popular. Seriously. [1]
[http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm](http://www.cowboyway.com/What/HorsePopulation.htm)

~~~
ThomPete
Exactly. Horses met their mechancial limits in competition with technology
just as humans will meet their intellectual limits.

------
synaesthesisx
The issue seems to be that fruit is often obscured by leaves/plant matter -
why not use ultrasound or something to help locate the strawberries?

~~~
mc32
I can't really tell from the video, but they would, in addition to knowing a
strawberry was behind a leaf, need to know if they were ripe or not --so they
would have to push leaves out of the way to tell visually via color if they
were ripe; unless there are other signals that could be used. Basically,
"presence" is not equal to "ready for picking".

~~~
jonknee
> so they would have to push leaves out of the way to tell visually via color
> if they were ripe

That's also what people do, seems to work OK (I grew up in Florida and did
lots of u-pick strawberries).

~~~
mc32
Agreed. But since the article mentions the current system not being able to
detect strawberries behind leaves, they'd have to adapt it to one, detect a
strawberry behind foliage, two determine readiness for picking.

So, yes, moving leaves and color works for people, but is that also the best
method for an automated mechanical system?

~~~
jacobush
Don't know about best, but it could work. I'd easily imagine some horribly
spider like appendage expertly pushing leaves aside and sticking a little
camera in there, probing for them little berries.

~~~
ddnb
Or blow some air on the plants, rustling the leaves, sensors picking up any
red between the green then going in to pick the strawberry.

------
AndrewKemendo
_" Hey, it could happen! Put a man on the moon, didn't we?"_

I think it's funny cause as a ML engineer I can totally understand why it's in
many ways easier to get people to the moon and back than to solve dynamic leaf
occlusion and object segmentation at scale.

~~~
craftyguy
In other news, we don't actually have the technology anymore to put a man on
the Moon. Hence why we are having to redevelop it all over again.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Having grown up around Johnson Space Center and the decommissioned Saturn V on
display, I think this is more of a "technically true" misnomer. It's true in
the same way we don't have the technology to build a 69 Camaro anymore because
we dismantled it and have no desire to, not because we have lost the technical
capability.

~~~
craftyguy
The difference between the technology to build a 69 Camaro and a vehicle to
take us to the Moon (heh, among many) is that the technology to build the
Camaro has steadily evolved into the technology we use to build cars today,
whereas we literally stopped making Moon transfer vehicles about 50 years ago
and literally haven't made anything since that is capable of doing it again.

~~~
Gibbon1
It's not the the technology hasn't advanced. There's been a lot of
improvements in aerospace manufacturing techniques and materials since then.
It's just the cost vs interest isn't there.

In the case of the US the space shuttle program was the big disaster. Keeping
them operational consumed so much of NASA's budget that they couldn't afford
to develop a heavy lift vehicle. That and the bloated US military industrial
pork complex can't make anything on time and on budget.

~~~
JetSpiegel
> It's not the the technology hasn't advanced. There's been a lot of
> improvements in aerospace manufacturing techniques and materials since then.
> It's just the cost vs interest isn't there.

Isn't that a distinction without difference?

We have the technology to solve world hunger, it's just the cost vs interest
isn't there.

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fredley
> "You could afford to give people a day off, you know. Afternoons off,
> holidays off. If you have machines behind you."

What total bullshit. No advance in mechanisation has ever resulted in this
happening. What happens is that the workers get the days off, but it's not
holidays, it's being unemployed.

~~~
ArekDymalski
>No advance in mechanisation has ever resulted in this happening.

Can you point to some source of this information? I'm asking because when I
look at the data I see that for example industrial revolution was correlated
with: 1\. Reduced length of a work-day. 2\. Increased lifetime expectancy as
well as overall quality of life. 3\. Elimination of child labor.

And all of this happening while general population was growing.

I just wonder why this could be different?

~~~
dustinmoorenet
The 40 hour week was not a gift of tech. It was a hard fought labor struggle.
And, if you haven't noticed, we haven't moved that needle again after
introducing computers.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-
hour_day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day)

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westmeal
Why not just probe around the plants and look for red against the green and
brown backdrop

~~~
coldtea
I'm pretty sure that's the very first thing that came to their mind...

~~~
ksk
Why do you think someone can't solve fundamental domain problems by thinking
about it for 10 seconds? :)

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205guy
Article did not mention whether the autonomous berry picker crushed a
strawberry by accident for the first time.

~~~
tabtab
It indeed was not clear about the specific problems. It basically implied that
it shouldn't pick all strawberries, just a subset, probably the most ripe. But
it didn't describe well what the bot keeps getting wrong.

I suspect people use tactile feedback in addition to sight, but that is
difficult for bots to get right because it requires lots of contact sensors,
lots of processing, and lots of coordination with vision to tune well (at our
current stage of AI). But it does sound like it's getting incrementally better
such that the bots' time will eventually come. I wonder if a spectragram could
reduce the need for tactile sampling? That's something a bot has up on humans.

