
Robot uses machine learning to harvest lettuce - hhs
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/robot-uses-machine-learning-to-harvest-lettuce
======
Havoc
I'm sure there are complexities here that I'm not seeing, but...neat rows,
uniform textures, little noise, no external interference, physical feedback,
low risk.

Relatively to say a self driving car that needs to deal with dogs running into
the road in questionable weather at decent speed this seems comparatively
easy.

That's not meant to be condescending - I know for a fact I can't program a
lettuce harvester at all let alone a better one. Just seems like there is a
weird difficulty differential at play here.

~~~
nexuist
There are quite a few human jobs that deal with "neat rows, uniform textures,
little noise, no external interference, physical feedback, low risk." Think:
gift wrapping, cookie cutting, sewing, etc. As it currently stands, people
still work these jobs in large quantities even though we have the technology
to automate all of them out.

It is certainly comparatively easy to self driving cars. But that's the point:
while we haven't solved level 5 autonomy yet, we do seem to be solving these
lower level problems at or above the same skill level as trained
professionals, and the amount of problems we solve with machine learning
technology appears to be increasing at an exponential rate. It's logical to
extrapolate from here that AI will be able to solve even harder problems in
the future, including those our best researchers still haven't figured out.

A job at its core is applied problem solving. When AI services and physical
robots can solve every problem in a better way than humans against every
metric possible, there won't really be a need for humans in the workforce.

~~~
visarga
> When AI services and physical robots can solve every problem in a better way
> than humans against every metric possible, there won't really be a need for
> humans in the workforce.

That logic assumes humans want to share equitably the ownership of robots and
their benefits.

~~~
zizee
I often see this pessimistic prediction, and I don't get it.

What benefit would someone have to not pass on cost savings to consumers if
they had a super effective robot to do something? And regardless of their
motives, how would they stop it from happening? Patents have limited lifetimes
and and techniques developed will be quickly replicated/democratized.

Perhaps someone could corner the market for a while, but not indefinitely.

In the end, the result of automated production will be downward pressure on
prices, with consumables trending towards $0.

With this in mind, it strikes me that the pessimistic predictions stem from
the idea that there is a secret cabal of the "wealthy" who take great
pleasure* in keeping their fellowman down. Today, by many measurements people
living in wealthy countries have a standard of living so far superior to that
of kings of old. Has the secret cabal been just lying in wait until now to
strike?

* sure, some percentage of billionaires are probably sociopaths, but I'm sure most are not.

~~~
black_puppydog
In the very limit, at full, 100% automation, this might hold true. But right
up until that point, there will still be _some_ jobs that need to be done by
humans. And if we don't fundamentally change our understanding/social contract
of what it means to be a Valuable (TM) human being and member of a society,
there will be huge conflicts arising from this.

Think of all the anti-welfare rhetoric around people just being "too lazy to
work." If this continues to be a socially-accepted way of thinking about
people without jobs, then automating away significant portions of the required
workforce will be very painful for the victims of the process.

~~~
zizee
Interestingly the three responses to my comment are quite similar, which makes
me wonder that I misunderstood what the grandparent was writing.

> That logic assumes humans want to share equitably the ownership of robots
> and their benefits.

I read that as the robot ownders not wanting to share, but now I see that
perhaps the grandparent was talking about society as a whole.

I suspect the difference here is one of context. I live in a country that has
a fairly strong social safety net when compared to the popular conception of
the safety net in the United States of America.

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inflatableDodo
This sounds cool. I've been spending some spare time designing an outdoor
solar pumped hydroponic waterflume system intended to connect to the top and
bottom panes of a residential window, that uses robotic gates between looping
sections for growing leafy greens suspended in the flowing water by floating
planters that progress slowly from the inlet at the top to the outlet at the
bottom of the window as they progress from seedling to full plant. The design
can also be disguised as a 'garden water-feature' in a range of styles from
'70s sci-fi to minature Roman aquaduct.

edit - am intending to publish an open source git repo of the thing, should I
get any further than my current mass of sketches.

~~~
cwkoss
Very neat idea, I'd love to hear more about this.

How would you control the position of plants within the flume?

Personally, I've been pondering a solar-pumped hydroponic system which uses
bell siphons under a big 'deer scarer' like off-balance tipping vessel to
periodically flood-then-flush a number of sequential gravity-fed zones.

~~~
inflatableDodo
>How would you control the position of plants within the flume?

Turnstile gates that allow a plant to pass through with the flow of water into
the next section. So the main power requirement is a pump to raise the water
back to the top, the gates are very minor and the whole thing is achievable
easily with a fairly modest solar panel and battery setup.

~~~
cwkoss
Cool, thanks.

I recently found cheap (and weak) solar pumps on aliexpress. They can only
pump up about 3ft when lit, would prefer something with better performance,
will probably try some others. Been playing with the idea of making a passive
solar system for filling a water tower from a rain barrel on the ground. Might
need to find a bit beefier one. But maybe you'd be interested in these - no
battery so it only runs when the sun is out.

ex.
[https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32893336462.html](https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32893336462.html)

~~~
inflatableDodo
Thanks :) Sounds ideal for my purposes, I don't need more than three foot.

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jedberg
Look, more simple but labor intensive jobs being replaced by automation. Our
society will definitely need to solve this problem sooner than later. Soon we
won't have any jobs left that can be done without an education.

~~~
kodachi
That is something I thing about frequently. On one hand, I think it's great to
have self-sustaining homes/neighborhoods that require minimal manual
repetitive work. Then I think that there are lots of people who know nothing
but that. knowledge". If you lose the ability to adapt and learn (something we
all probably do as we age), then you are left out.

~~~
TrainedMonkey
There is another side of the coin - to make universal basic income work cost
of foodstuff, healthcare, and construction (and thus housing) needs to be
pushed extremely low. This kind of automation enables it.

There is no argument that automating these jobs will incur tremendous human
suffering by taking away jobs. However, in the long term I don't want anyone
to be 'harvesting lettuce'.

~~~
barry-cotter
Or we could expand wage subsidies like the earned income tax credit. That has
the advantage of not causing labour supply to drop precipitously and would
cost much less than UBI so it could be implemented far sooner. And if the math
on UBI comes anywhere near working out you passed the point of being able to
afford wage subsidies long ago.

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Animats
There are lots of experimental picking robots. Apples, especially. None are
yet commercial technology, but several prototyepe apple-picking robots are
getting reasonably close. The machinery is still too slow and too fragile for
routine use.

Machine learning for weeding is in production. "Recognize weed, kill weed"
targeted weeding is available from John Deere and others now. Picking, not
yet.

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soheil
Not sure if ML is the answer given there are much more efficient machines that
already do this at scale [0]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjAXX-
PCwjI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjAXX-PCwjI)

~~~
flor1s
Nice video. The article somewhat addresses this: "These previous approaches
include using a belt‐driven band saw‐type mechanisms or water jet cutting.
These approaches have limitations, most notably that the outer leaves of the
lettuce can be easily damaged when harvesting and there is a lack of
reliability in stem cutting height and quality."

Seems like the solution discussed in the article does not really improve upon
this significantly: "As the project stands, the damage rate, caused by cutting
the lettuce stem too short, is too high for supermarket standards, although
the harvested vegetables were perfectly edible. The most recent sample size of
69 lettuces was enough to confirm this as the next problem to address
(hundreds of lettuces had been harvested over previous iterations). Future
versions of Vegebot will need to address and improve the damage rate, perhaps
with visual feedback from the harvested lettuces dynamically adjusting the
force threshold at which the cut is made. In parallel, the end effector needs
to be made lighter to achieve a human‐level cycle time, possibly by
manufacturing with carbon fiber, or by using an alternative, stronger
cartesian arm design."

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dghughes
A similar machine exists for white asparagus. I believe it was custom made by
the people who own the family farm.

The link below doesn't give much info. I think it uses electrical resistance
in the soil to determine if the asparagus spear is ready to be picked.

[https://www.futurefarming.com/Machinery/Articles/2018/4/Spar...](https://www.futurefarming.com/Machinery/Articles/2018/4/Sparter-
Worlds-first-selective-asparagus-harvesting-robot-273538E/)

~~~
a_bonobo
I think this works extremely well in custom applications, small family farms
etc. - here's another beautiful example from a small Japanese cucumber farm

[https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/how-a-japanese-
cu...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/how-a-japanese-cucumber-
farmer-is-using-deep-learning-and-tensorflow)

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> Although the prototype is nowhere near as fast or efficient as a human
worker, it demonstrates how the use of robotics in agriculture might be
expanded, even for crops like iceberg lettuce which are particularly
challenging to harvest mechanically.

I'll be the sour one again, but we've had robots who are nowhere near as fast
or efficient as humans for at least 60 years now and they keep getting better.
And they're still nowhere near as fast or efficient as humans.

~~~
barry-cotter
Robots keep on expanding in the range of areas where they are as fast and
efficient as humans, or better. Industrial automation is why the value of US
manufacturing keeps growing while employment has dropped or held steady.

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devy
Google has been collaborating with Japanese farmers in this field as early as
2016[1], and put up a case study to demonstrate their GCP AI offering.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/how-a-japanese-
cu...](https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/how-a-japanese-cucumber-
farmer-is-using-deep-learning-and-tensorflow)

~~~
ipsum2
Collaborating seems like a strong word to use here. Google wrote about a
farmer using Tensorflow to identify good cucumbers.

------
est
somewhat related in 2016

[https://futurism.com/world-first-robot-run-farm-
harvest-3000...](https://futurism.com/world-first-robot-run-farm-
harvest-30000-heads-lettuce-daily)

------
benj111
It interesting to think what this could do for farming. Imagine one of these
to a field continuously driving around. First weeding, killing pests, targeted
watering, then when you get to harvesting you can be so much more targeted. If
you have an order for 100 lettuce of x weight, the robot can remember the 100
that most closely match that weight, and go an harvest that 100 only,
replanting a seed in the space. Or you could plant at double density and
harvest every other one young.

It could measure nutrients and moisture in every square metre of soil,
recording what grows best where in each patch of a field.

The amount of precision it could bring is amazing, potentially organic, and at
least much improved efficiencies and carbon emissions.

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isegrim
On a related note—YC funded a few years ago a cool-looking startup working on
a robotic greenhouse, Iron Ox [0].

[0] [http://ironox.com/](http://ironox.com/)

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SubiculumCode
Not to be flippant but isn't it machine learning using the robot, not the
other way around?

~~~
jefft255
Not really, the robot uses it in the sense that the machine learning algorithm
will detect cabbages and tell if it's ready, and that information will be used
by the robot to perform harvesting.

Of course, you can have end-to-end control of the robot via machine learning
(they seem, for example, to use another camera for blade control), and at this
stage you could be right but in the robotics community we always say that a
robot uses machine learning, not the other way around.

~~~
SubiculumCode
If you think of machine learning as the mind and the robot as the body...does
the body use the mind or does the mind use the body?

~~~
inetknght
Why does it have to be a one-way use?

~~~
SubiculumCode
It was more of a comment on how we use language about a machine and its
intelligence compared to how we use language about a human and a human's
intelligence. To be clear, my comment was not taking a position on whether the
dichotomy of mind and body, machine and algorithm actually exists or is
meaningful, but of perhaps a bias that we have in how we describes machine
that exhibit some intelligence.

I think it is more common to speak of our minds as controlling our bodies than
vice versa, but we don't seem to naturally extend that to machines with
intelligence.

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sam0x17
obligatory: my cabbages!!!

But no this is an extremely cool application of machine learning. It's
interesting that many of the low-paying professions are actually extremely
difficult to automate -- a robot that can harvest lettuce is much scarcer than
a person who can harvest lettuce.

~~~
inetknght
Why do you think a robot capable of harvesting lettuce is more valuable than a
person?

~~~
sam0x17
You are confusing monetary value with intrinsic value -- I have edited my post
to be more clear.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
This actually has a chance to make lettuce safer by cutting down on how much
lettuce is handled by humans.

[https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/02/health/e-coli-lettuce-
explain...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/02/health/e-coli-lettuce-
explainer/index.html)

It is does that, this could be a case of machine learning literally saving
human lives.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Contamination of produce has been due to using contaminated water for
irrigation or washing, or infested storage. It has nothing to do with there
being a human picker or not. The article you cite essentially points this out.

