DailyDirt: Robots For Farming

Fri, Jul 12th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Robots are perfect for tedious and boring tasks, and they seem to be well-suited for the repetitive labor of farming. More and more robots are getting into the farming industry, with the potential to displace a lot of human labor. It might take some time before robots are growing a significant portion of our food supply, but farming technology could solve a lot of problems (and create a few more labor problems as well). Here are just a few more farming robots that might take over our farms.

A "Lettuce Bot" made by Blue River Technology can recognize the difference between weeds and budding lettuce. This robot could improve yields for crops without using pesticides, but it would have to be re-trained for each new crop. [url]
Hydroponic lettuce farms could be automated with indoor fields maintained by robots. Hortiplan is testing a hydroponic farm in Belgium, and hopefully, world hunger can be solved eating lettuce...? [url]
Remote controlled helicopters can spray herbicides and pesticides more efficiently, and the RMAX helicopter has been used in Japanese rice fields for 20 years. The same mini-helicopter is being tested in a Napa vineyard, after obtaining FAA clearance to operate at a maximum altitude of 20 feet. [url]

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Filed Under: agriculture, ai, farming, harvest, helicopters, hydroponic, image recognition, lettuce, pesticides, rmax, robots, weeds
Companies: blue river technology, hortiplan

19 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jul 2013 @ 5:27pm

Those robots better be built here because we don't want any illegal alien robots tending our crops.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Jul 2013 @ 6:32pm

Re:
Japanese robots are going to take over. But it won't really matter because the robots will built themselves on US soil.

I wonder when there will be people who will only eat food that is grown entirely by robots b/c human-harvested food is inhumane.
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PopeRatzo (profile), 12 Jul 2013 @ 7:21pm

Peak labor
The people who lead our biggest economies are just not ready for what's going to happen when we just don't need to have everyone working in order to provide for the goods and services that we need and want. Here in the US, instead of adjusting to a lower workforce participation rate, we've spent the past 50 years, a period of greater automation AND far greater worker productivity INCREASING the workforce participation rate. Instead of looking at the benefits to be had from having people working less, we have corporations trying to get their workers to do more.

On top of that, we have this superstitious Calvinist notion that "everybody has to work" or they are useless. That somehow, working all the time is a good thing - even that God wants us to work all the time (idle hands...).

At least some of the more sophisticated economies in Northern Europe have figured out job sharing.

What happens when we reach "peak labor"? What happens to people put out of work due to automation? We just don't need everyone to start their own business. Not everyone can or should be, an entrepreneur. How many maids and baristas do we really need? And are we willing to pay even the lowliest job a wage sufficient for survival (currently, we are not and we are fighting over whether to even have a minimum wage)?

And finally, how long can we sustain an increasing consolidation of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, especially considering that just may not need everyone to be working - or certainly not working so goddamn hard?
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Andrew D. Todd, 12 Jul 2013 @ 10:36pm

Electronic Immigration
Once a physical job has been reduced to an information job, the information job can be outsourced in real time. For example, consider the lettuce-weeding machine. It has a physical method-- an overdose of fertilizer, squirted at specified coordinates; a camera; and a machine-vision program to distinguish between lettuces and weeds.

Suppose that before being used, the machine-vision program's output were overlaid on the camera image (say a red circle for a weed, a blue one for a lettuce, and a yellow circle for a borderline case). This image would be sent to Bangladesh, to a remote village where there are very few sources of employment, and five or ten dollars a day is a good wage. There, a Bangladeshi farm-worker, who does not need to speak English or even to be literate, would sit in front of a screen, and clicks on the various circles with his mouse, correcting them, before they got squirted with fertilizer or not. The machine-vision system would be dynamically reprogrammed by the Bangladeshi farm-worker's choices, rather than being expensively reprogrammed by American computer scientists. This is important, because in different places, and at different seasons, there are different kinds of weeds. The Bangladeshi would adapt to new conditions, and the machine would adapt with him.
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PopeRatzo (profile), 13 Jul 2013 @ 4:40am

reductio ad absurdum ad absurdum
I hope you don't believe that when physical jobs are "reduced" to information jobs, that there is anything like a one-to-one relationship between the number of jobs before reduction and the number after.

Nor is there a one-to-one relationship in the wages.

What you say does not address my concerns about peak labor and the fallacy of "full employment".
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jul 2013 @ 5:59am

Oh great!
Now the Walmart greeters will be replaced with robots??
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Anonymous, 13 Jul 2013 @ 10:16am

Re: Peak labor
Isn't the notion that "'everybody has to work' or they are useless" more of a Marxist/communist notion?
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Anonymous, 13 Jul 2013 @ 10:18am

Re: Peak labor
"even that God wants us to work all the time". Ever heard of a little thing called the Sabbath day?
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jul 2013 @ 12:46pm

Re: Re: Peak labor
Do robots also have to shut down on Sundays?

Maybe they could just drive really slow wandering around across lanes like they're drunk.
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Anonymous Coward, 13 Jul 2013 @ 12:50pm

Re: Re: Peak labor
Lately it seems to be an American Taliban thing to say the unemployed are useless and/or lazy drug users - when in fact it is (in whole or part) the laissez faire capitalism which is responsible for their demise.
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Anonymous, 13 Jul 2013 @ 3:35pm

Re: Re: Re: Peak labor
Well, then you get into the whole "Do robots have souls?" thing...
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Andrew D. Todd, 14 Jul 2013 @ 2:24am

Retirement Age, to: PopeRatzo, #5, Jul 13th, 2013 @ 4:40am
Well, as I see it, a practical measure in the short run is going to be something like lowering the retirement age, tweaking Social Security, Medicare, and Disability Insurance, and by doing so, mopping up some unemployment. Of course, organizing the change will require some financial legerdemain, but that is another story. The automobile industry tried to do this, twenty and thirty years ago, but, without access to government funding, they eventually went broke, trying to run their own welfare state. There was a kind of earlier analogy. Circa 1929-30, General Electric tried to run its own "new deal," but it ran out of money, and had to give up, and wait for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to be voted into office. Lowering the retirement age is a comparatively good solution, because it does not involve making people think about work in new ways.

As it is, you're trying to put the clock back. To take the example of salad greens, LED gro-lamps have reached the point where they are competitive with the sun, at least for vegetable growing. Combine those with a small hydroponic unit, with robots, and you can put the system in the basement where it stays reasonably warm, even in a cold winter. The commercial growers have to compete with a home system of this kind. The high-end customers, the ones who are fussiest about pesticides and so on, will be the first to buy their own hydroponic greenhouses. If you can't prevent the ultimate customers from producing their own, you are in no position to impose requirements on a commercial producer.
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PopeRatzo (profile), 14 Jul 2013 @ 4:31am

requires political change
I don't see the US (or most EU countries) lowering the retirement age any time soon, considering the prevalent political view at the moment (at least among elites) is to RAISE the retirement age.

That's my concern. In view of high unemployment, greater income disparity, etc, these countries are doing everything they can to make those problems worse.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jul 2013 @ 6:10am

Re: requires political change
Heh - according to some of our self proclaimed financial wonks in politics, elimination of the minimum wage would lead to zero unemployment.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jul 2013 @ 7:41pm

How long will it take the pests to evolve to evade the lettuce bots sensors? Perhaps another evolutionary course would be to damage or otherwise subvert the lettuce bots.

Maybe skynet will come about through a real honest to god biological virus...
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jul 2013 @ 8:41pm

Re: Electronic Immigration
basically your describing a machine with an operator, no different than a combine harvester.

You don't need a mechanical engineer to drive a combine, nor do you need a computer scientist to operate an automatic weeder.

Machines and robots are and have been used in farming for almost as long as farming itself.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jul 2013 @ 8:45pm

Re:
how long will it take for the pest to evolve programming skills, or the weeds !!!!. So they can program the robot to kill the fruit and make more room for the weeds.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jul 2013 @ 8:48pm

Re: Re: requires political change
that's right, make minimum wage ZERO, pay everyone minimum wage,, zero unemployment.
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Greg, 22 Jul 2013 @ 4:57pm

Robotics are making all types of businesses more productive. From laboratories to farms to factories, they are handling routine tasks so humans have more interesting jobs to do.
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