DailyDirt: Robots To Help Feed Everyone

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Tue, Jul 5th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Robots are supposed to help people do all sorts of jobs -- dangerous jobs, repetitive jobs, etc. And one really important job that robots could be really useful for... would be to help feed us humans. Here are some robots that are already pitching in.

What could be more fun than a pancake-making robot made out of Lego... A Disney lawsuit story over the Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes? [url]
Autonomous robot farmers will help harvest and cultivate all sorts of crops. As long as humans aren't turned into Coppertops... [url]
Maybe grocery stores could just be giant vending machines. But somebody still needs to mind the store because it looks like roughly half of the population might try to walk out without paying. [url]
To discover more interesting robotics-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]

By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

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Filed Under: farming, food, pancakes, robots, vending machines

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Anonymous Coward, 5 Jul 2011 @ 5:05pm

Don't be too worried about being turned into a battery - humans consume more energy than they would provide, the same way that beef cattle take more calories to produce than they provide. If robots were killing off humans anyway, sure, they might throw us in a furnace, but the odds of a 'human farm' taking shape are rather low.
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Nicedoggy, 5 Jul 2011 @ 5:11pm

Unless people start building vertical farms the people of the world will starve, but those robots are cool anyways.
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Nicedoggy, 5 Jul 2011 @ 5:19pm

Talking about starving I'm going out to my victory garden now :)
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Pixelation, 5 Jul 2011 @ 9:41pm

This is all well and fine as long as the robots don't displace all of the pot farmers.
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Andrew D. Todd, 5 Jul 2011 @ 9:55pm

The First Automatic Store.
About twenty-seven years ago, when I was in engineering school, I took a course in marketing. This was at the University of Cincinnati, and the professor was a man by the name of Robert E. Dillon.

http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/umarmot/?p=979

Anyway, he told us about something called a "Kadoozle Store," which had been attempted back in the 1930's. It was apparently not a success, and has been extremely forgotten-- I can't find anything about it by searching Google. Dillon told it, more or less as an exercise in "pushing the limits," and it was therefore the kind of thing that only an expert would know about. Anyway, the idea was that the Kadoozle Store worked like a coke machine on a larger scale, with various canned goods, each in their individual racks, and motorized levers causing them to drop to chutes or conveyor belts.

First one took a hand-held paper-tape punch, and walked around to wall displays showing the various goods. One plugged the punch into sockets associated with each picture, and that caused the punch to punch a code into the paper tape. Think of it as the equivalent of a bar-code scanner by more primitive methods.

One then took the tape to the checkout counter, where it was fed into a totalizator machine to compute the bill. Once that was done, and the groceries were paid for, the clerk would insert the paper tape into a reader device, which would activate the levers of all the various racks, and the various items would come spilling down the various chutes to a central collection point.
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Michael Ho (profile), 5 Jul 2011 @ 11:39pm

Re: The First Automatic Store.
Considering that Blockbuster Video has essentially been overtaken by the likes of RedBox... I think more robot stores should be on the way. Maybe there will just be 3D printers that'll print stuff out for you at your local Walmart....
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Nicedoggy, 6 Jul 2011 @ 5:30am

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2011-07/video-tescos-new-virtual-grocery-lets-you-browse-store -shelves-while-waiting-subway

I just came across this news.
Apparently Tesco build a virtual store on the subways of South Korea and people use their cellphones to snap photos of the QR Codes and get the groceries delivered to them.

Maybe other stores will pay more attention to mass transit systems that can be coupled with real sales and generate real money LoL

It could also make giant wall of e-ink something every bus stop, train station, subway want to invest on it.

Since Google has launched the e-wallet they probably are in the best place to monetize that.
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