I guess in the near term dozens of specialized robots for each task will be necessary, but the idea I like is teams of general purpose robots using simple tools to perform almost any task "manually". It's too early to implement that now, but I think it will be feasible within my lifetime.
in my experience, this is the best approach. I worked at a few biotechs that did a lot of lab automation.
the robots that could do everything were hardly ever used because they did everything poorly and seemed to be constantly in need of repair.
the robots that could do one simple job were always in use.
One group I'm familiar with are using 50kv (and "more than enough" amps) for the purpose.
This is just a misunderstanding of the risks involved in various things.
That said, comparing a 50Kv shock to a handheld taser (which typically run at 300-500v) makes me think I might not be the one who misunderstands the risks.
You're off by three orders of magnitude. You need about 32 million volts per meter to overcome the resistance of the air. For a gap of a centimeter, it's about a few hundred kilovolts.
And I grew up farming, I'm quite familiar with the dangers.
For example harvesting equipment... the big ones are sort of up to a 30 food wide chainsaw with conveyors and other grabby bits to suck you in. People need to be many meters away from those things while they're running for any sense of safety. A hot spark has nothing on many other dangers and if designed with any sense would only result in severe local burns. Plenty of farm equipment will effortlessly rip a limb off if it doesn't tear your entire body into bite sized chunks.
You know the machines that do that and you don't go near them. When you're the operator you must know where everyone is at all times and know what they mean to do... and be able to communicate with them with a series of gestures, eye contact, short yells, etc. If you don't it's trivially easy to kill your helpers.
If people have to stay around to care for it, then yes, it's scary.
Well targeted as they seem to do, I guess it is a good product to preserve the soil and wanted plants with no harmful residues.
The cynic in me wants to point out that this is basically a commerce, so of course they use the best sounding chemical possible. Will they still use that by the time it becomes a commercial product? I guess only time will tell.
I wonder about the effects of acidification after long term use. Perhaps some alkaline filler can be added to balance.
I put vinegar in my salad sauce, I would not dare with glyphosate.
[0]: https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/industries/agriculture/...
The challenge with Agtech robots in general is that you need to be able to prove payback, including all operations costs, in ideally 12 months or less on equipment.
This is very hard for most crops because you have to be constantly moving from field to field. However, it is doable and I see it happening soon, starting in specific crops (My company L5 [1] is working this for strawberries).
However, as the price of raw tech inputs (robot arms, compute, cameras) continue to fall, I do see lots of “low hanging fruit” that can be won relatively soon, especially with smart software.
Automation of day-neutral strawberry picking sounded sensible on first glance to me because harvest occurs over many months of a year (extendable by transporting the robots to another region with different growing seasons) thus robots are not sitting around idle for 95% of the year. Additionally, harvesting strawberries is dangerous work for humans to perform due to repetitive twisting, bending and reaching.
However, looking deeper into the economics of strawberries (using Australia as an example), picking costs are stated to only be 20% of fixed growing costs[1] seemingly amounting to AUD$1.30/plant (USD$0.80-1.00/plant). With a typical density of 40000 plants/hectare, robots appear to only be cost neutral if they can be operated at AUD$52000/hectare (USD$30000-40000/hectare) for picking. This results in, for example, two AUD$26000/year (USD$15000-20000/year) robots assigned per hectare needing to pick at a rate of 2 seconds per plant[2] for 12 hours each every day. With 9 million tons of strawberries produced globally per year, the strawberry harvesting market would be AUD$11bn if Australian labour rates, likely amongst the highest, were the global norm.
Would it be fair to say that farm automation will only become viable if everyone accepts the true cost of growing produce is much higher than current prices. That, for example, wages for farm workers would need to be much higher (doubled or more) to be livable wages and also to compensate for injuries and health risks of farm work and an inability to work in manual labour jobs at older age. In Australia we're seeing many news articles on the topic of "lack of farm workers" so a significant upwards movement in farm worker wages seems possible. Or perhaps strict health and safety regulations introduced to protect farm workers from repetitive injuries would result in wide adoption of farm robotics? Or perhaps it will just be cheap robotics that results in mass uptake of farm robotics?.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-06-25/breakdown-of-th...
[2] Per a 2019 example from one of your competitors (https://youtu.be/9cxHYEzMVKQ?t=106) it looks very difficult to pick at a rate of 2 seconds per plant without wastage (e.g. missing obscured berries) but my simple calculations are nonetheless optimistic.
Huh, I actually thought it was using a laser and the 95% chemicals meant through the entire farming process. In that case it's probably much less than 95% chemical use overall, there's still pesticides and fertilizer to consider, not to mention chemicals used in cleaning and packaging.
I wonder what kind of power you'd need to laser weeds at that speed? Now that I think about it, probably like, a lot. And maybe it'd heat up the surrounding plants too much.
Spraying with that much accuracy is still pretty cool though.
Two other things I thought were interesting in the video. One, the idea of mapping the whole field is pretty cool. There must be useful things you could do with a millimeter-scale 3D map of an entire field. Two, this is happening in California, just a few hours' drive from Silicon Valley. I hope some of the engineers laid off recently find work in ag tech, because there will be huge opportunities coming with the rise of computer vision and (hopefully soon) robotics.