The project is pretty well thought out and extremely ambitious. I can only hope they continue to make good progress on it.
Yup, actually if you read between the edits toward the end of the video I think this is in the minds of those working on it, not sure why it wasn't focused on more, perhaps because it sounds less immediately practical... once the automation is somewhat intelligent, the need for a monoculture for viable large scale agriculture is diminished.
In fact at a certain point of sophistication, especially when harvesting a polyculture becomes viable, it will probably flip and become significantly more profitable long term to abandon monoculture... since the soil health will improve over time which also improves yields.
Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable target could be something like 'one human to operate the location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues can be corrected in a reasonable length of time.
'We' have already succeeded in autonomous driving in agricultural and mining domains - these are much simpler, more tightly controlled and less liability prone than open highways and suburban backstreets.
eg:
> We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and directions of all vehicles at all times.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
Current advancements already allow tractors to go autonomously go over the bulk of the same large areas of ground that they have for the past decade (already logged and recorded), graceful fallback alerts remote farmer to make a human decision re: tree falls, new rocks, unexpected gear state changes.
These are useful advancements in machine control.
These developments have locally run in parallel with the above linked Rio Tinto work here in W.Australia - it's a pity the largest mining operation on the globe has imagined its work to be productive and useful and allowed its cost analysis to sway its thinking lacking your insight to the contrary.
I work for John Deere, I can't speak for the company.
But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following.
Honestly, I think robot swarms will be simpler than large singles.
I hope you don't mean "Boids" and the three-four simple rules, because that's just an approximation of a swarm behavior made for artistic purposes - i.e. the result is supposed to pass as a flock of birds or a school of fish to casual onlookers (e.g. gamers, audience of a movie), and not to be accurate to the real thing.
'Robot Sheepdog' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tefXVXscNDM
I'd like to add, that while individual behavior is difficult to predict, a general motion prediction can be much easier. (Think shepherds, for example)
The "swarm" is meaningless there. Each node need to have minimum amount of sensing and computation to handle that job.
It's also at worst "a sloped square" so there is no "swarm mechanic" to move around, just zigzag around the field.
There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is being done.
farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far away… because some already give reports of what went wrong to the central
Yeah, nobody suggested that we have building size tractors so I don't know what you're arguing.
They were talking about "current farming machine sized ones" vs "a drone with some crap attached"
One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
Now, the video is shot in a shiny nice weather day. Now imagine how would it perform if it's raining since last Tuesday.
The only reason you think it's easy is because you ignore the number and just imagine doing it once anyway.
(40 hours / 10,000 batteries = 14.4 seconds per battery; USA minimum wage = $7.25/h = $290 per 40h week, about the same as the cheapest hydraulic lift I saw on machinemart.co.uk at current exchange rates, but I'm not a mechanic so I don't know if that would be the right tool for the job anyway).
And of course, the same applies if we really had drone swarms — anything like this would be automated, up to and including full disassembly of damaged units so their parts could be reused for new units, e.g. https://youtu.be/pDZdnbI0MAc
Big farm will also have more than one machine and the "downtime" will be mostly scheduled maintenance, very little chance of your equipment just deciding to not work today. In case of many smaller farms, well, you can ask the neighbour... from what I remember from living in small village with many farmers "harvest" was often few farms pooling their resources and doing all the fields together, instead of each doing their own.
There's so much opportunity for improvement, but we need the R&D money and start-ups to be there too. Please, VCs, spend your money on these projects!
A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply.
This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm critters rely on the emergent effects of lots of behavior to make up for their limited sensing and computation. By 'limited' I mean relative to a mammal or bird. Lots of behavior means lots of energy spent moving and doing: exactly what is prohibitively expensive for a robot.
Computation and sensing is getting better, smaller and cheaper much faster than batteries and actuators. This trend favors smarter robots that think carefully (cheap) and do the right thing (expensive per shot).
Ag is hard. It’s dusty. The weather can be brutal. Stuff gets left out year round. The turnover is high. Schedules are dynamic and unforgiving (when the weather turns, you have to adapt your whole operation). There’s not a lot of highly technical staff to maintain things; bailing wire and bandaids is a real thing. The tradition of “hacking things” to keep them working comes from farmers.
The more complicated your machinery, the more your MTBF product goes up. So complicated units don’t scale well.
If a single sprinkler on a pivot fails or misbehaves, there’s nearly 400 of them and there’s some overlap. If your “robot” stalls out with some grit or a power supply issue or a bricked update, or leaky hydraulics, you just lost 1/10 of your pivot. Pray it happens on an inner span, rather than an outer one.
It’s interesting to note how the size of Meganeura is credited to environmental factors (oxygen ration in the air). Context is everything, as usual.
Well, toxic chemical agents can also be used as weapon on human civil, and — sadly — it was actually used that way. Plus even when you use them for farming, you still have pollution that will erode biodiversity, human health, and other sustainable environment negative impacts.
Not to say that robot swarm is necessarily a perfect green solution. You still have to build them and feed them with energy, so even if the robot would be exempt of undesirable side effect on local operational site, the global impact would most likely include plants in their lifecycle.
In Europe, taking the train is often more expensive than flying.
Sadly it's not fashionable because it isn't cheaper and takes a lot longer.
In the US, most tracks prioritize freight traffic over passenger rail. And there is a tremendous amount of freight traffic. There may not often be traffic jams, but when you are diverted to side track to wait and allow a priority freight train through, it's not uncommon to wait a very long time (I've been delayed more than an hour on the 3 hour train ride from Portland to Seattle).
There are also huge bottlenecks in US track infrastructure that absolutely do lead to traffic jams - perhaps most infamously in New York City. Vetoing the addition of 6 additional tracks through NYC is one of the reason Chris Christie was so hated.
https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars
There was even some hn post on it where someone detailed how much it costs and what you get
As your arm gets longer, it has to get stronger, thus heavier, thus requiring larger motors, and anchored to the ground better. After a handful of meters, robot arms can’t hold themselves up, let alone carry a useful tool.
There are multiple meter long robot arms for lifting big things in factories but they are enormous, enormously expensive, and consume enormous power.
But here’s a delightful concept that sidesteps this, by making the arm weigh nothing:
I work in this industry (contributing architect of https://nelsonirrigation.com/products/twig-wireless-controls...).
We dream of lots of fun things. And even try some of them. But not a few days go by that we don’t once again mutter “power is king” To each other. Everything we do revolves around the constraint of power budgets.
Make a square of tensioned cable (or rigid rail) boxing in some area of garden/food forest/farmland at a height above the plants. Have 4 modules which maintain position on opposite sides and holds a tensioned wire between them, making a tensioned wire along the x and a tensioned wire along the y. At the intersection of these wires there is a powered doohicky that can act like a spider and drop down onto the plants below and do its work. The power to the doohicky could be cable from either axis.
Following the other comment re: power being king, what if we used a hub-and-spoke model where small drones with cameras (for sensing) and simple arms w/ clampers (for manipulating) perform 'bursts' of energy intensive activity and aggregate their sensory inputs into one composite report on the health of the plants? They do their thing (maybe for 10 - 15 mins or however long their battery lasts) and then fly back to the hub to charge. The hub itself could rely on a hybrid combo of guaranteed external power and solar panels.
Ofc, it'd be cool to see a cost analysis of how expensive this solution is (from both technical and financial standpoints) versus simpler, more energy-efficient human inputs (aka walk around your garden and prune trees that need it and pick berries that are ripe).
This technology has existed for a long time now (see cable robots, or cable-suspended cameras)
My better half owns a small hotel with 19 rooms. Turns out running a simple 10 minutes task in each room takes... entire day (3 hours for the work + switch room overhead + breaks turns out to be full day often).
Of course, that movie does have certain other implications and side effects....
And very, very sad.
This sprayer is designed to promote the growth of {everything it doesn't kill}. Those 'weeds' will have as much benefit from the spot-spraying as the crop. Which is either significant, or it's negligible (and this sprayer is useless, so probably not that)
During those hot days having then written software for a hobby I thought there has to be a better way. Could a sprayer map weeds and apply chemicals in a single pass? I did an in depth investigation talking to tech people and university experts to see if what I imagined was possible. What I found out was that we were decades away from the tech making it possible.
A couple of years later Monsanto came out with Roundup resistant soybeans and my soybean field walking was greatly reduced overnight. Problem with this one solution fits all was that soybean yields dipped with the resistant beans for farmers that previously had good weed control and we began to develop more Roundup resistant weeds.
I did notice that this company is working with high value crops only. I believe the reason is the tech currently is quite expensive. Though in time the cost should come down as more farmers use it.
One problem for the Eastern states is the use of shields on the boom. The company that I worked for experimented with shields on our commercial sprayers. In fact we were the first people to do it East of the Rocky Mountains. We bought them because we wanted to be able to spray on windy days. The shields had problems and were parked in the weeds in a single crop season.
I did a lot of soil testing. Refused to go out on November 15th, the start of deer season, after the 4WD pickup I was using was shot up in a field. I hugged the floorboard as shots went through the truck and just over me. How a bright yellow pickup could be confused with a deer is beyond me.
Every single people working in their property should have one working non-stop in the deer season to signal that is not a deer. Some just are deertonic and unable to distinguish it from cars.
It wasn't. It was confused with a government vehicle. The one day a year that is synonymous with hunting accidents just provided plausible deniability for taking a few pot shots.
Basically, intensive agriculture is compensating for its destructive nature by just brutally suppressing any "undesirable" growth. In nature, pests target the weaker plants. Basically, you stress out plants by mismanaging them and they are fair game for a wide range of fungi, insects, etc. E.g. under or over watering them, depleting the soil, etc. all stress plants out. If you have unhealthy soil, it's hard to have healthy plants growing in it.
Intensive agriculture starts with disrupting the soil (by plowing it). This causes the soil to degrade over time and releases captured carbon into the atmosphere. The natural response is for aggressive weeds to start growing in disrupted soil. To "fix" this, farmers use a mix of pesticides and fertilizers. The pesticides kill a lot more than just the pests and weeds and then further degrades the soil and the bio diversity in and on it. And finally the fertilizer is just bleeding out of the land straight into the ground water and surrounding areas. It works but it is resource intensive. You need lots of water, chemicals, energy, etc to grow a single crop at the cost of literally anything else. Basically modern intensive farming grows mono cultures on top of artificially created deserts.
Organic farming avoids doing that. Try not to disrupt the soil. Kill off (and compost) weaker plants rather than trying to rescue them. Use nature to keep pests and weeds in check. Etc. It works but it is more labor intensive. You need people to look after things. You get healthier and tastier produce (cooks love organically grown stuff for this reason). However, automating that labor makes it more scalable. That's the opportunity here.
By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?. I've heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other areas
It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically if electricity becomes 10-100x more efficient
Vertical farms are essentially closed systems where nutrients, energy and some water goes in and produce comes out. There's a bit more to it of course but that's the general idea. They are climate controlled environments where light is provided via grow lights. In short, it uses energy which needs to come from somewhere.
You are confusing power requirements and greenhouse gases. Mostly these things use some form of sustainable power. Either sourced indirectly via some electricity provider; or directly with e.g. solar panels. If you think about it, the number one expensive consumable here is electricity and the cheapest way to produce it is via renewables. It's that simple. Why would you get more expensive energy if you can get it cheaper. Keeping all those ACs, lights, pumps, etc. going you are going to have to figure that one out or deal with competition that is smarter than you on that front.
There are probably a few farms that are forced to buy via the grid and are hopelessly dependent on their local coal burning monopolists. Not a great business plan but the good news is that coal is rapidly becoming a very unfashionable way to produce power due to the fact that it is expensive and dirty. It being expensive cuts down on energy margins and causes coal dependent producers to be dealing with awkward things like going bankrupt and being forced to pay more for their coal than they can charge for the resulting energy when wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Gas has similar issues, as people that pay gas bills these days can vouch for. Mine went up by 2x recently. Not great.
Solar's efficiency is below 50% [https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html]. I guess that means, for each m² of solar panel deployed, you'll get <50% of the yield that would be produced in that same land with horizontal farming (assuming fertile land).
You can argue that solar panels can be deployed in non-agricultural surfaces, and that's true, but it does not invalidate the point that wherever you can grow crops with direct sunlight, vertical farming does not make sense
It doesn't even need to use herbicides because it removes weeds mechanically. We actually build it to also fit into Europe's small(er) scale farms as well.
Regarding the energy issues mentioned multiple times in various threads here: We managed to make it solar powered and battery buffered to work autonomously for more than a working day.
Disclosure: Co-funder of the company
But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.
It used to be our fav tools, now we just don't go in that direction much anymore.
We could study, teach, bread, terraform, integrate and so on at a much larger scale and with better tech. It's just... It doesn't look like a product.
You are missing something important: soil compaction is a sub linear function of weight. which means that larger tractors that cover more area with the same tire tracks are must friendly for the soil, compared to many small tractors. Because of this factor larger is better. Eventually we may get to the point where the tractor runs on tracks, to allow even bigger tractors that touch a smaller are of soil.
Sure flying drones will have less soil compaction, and they will have a place in the future, but keeping something in the air uses vastly more energy than wheels on the ground.
To cultivate the earth we're going to mine other parts of it? I'm not suggesting getting rid of the tools that improve quality of life but does automating one aspect not cause 100 other things down the line? There's mining, factories, repairing, replacing.
Maybe instead of robots we work on getting people to have gardens on their property, in cities use the rooftops, stop importing foods from across the globe, etc.
> Imagine, a few years down the line, applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm. Not necessarily a big machine going through a flat field, but small drones tending to trees, vines, herbs, plants, pollinators and water features all in the location that is best for them based on local features. It could micromanage weeding and harvesting, but also composting, planting, grafting and nurturing keystone species and rare species while avoiding pesticide, nitrogen imbalance and soil compaction. A productive farm could look like the garden of Eden.