Having filled my share of blackberry flats, the first part of the picking motion is a ripeness check. You want the berry to be firm with a bit of give, and you want it to pull free from the plant easily. The force feedback sensors mentioned here seems to be for training purposes, but they would probably be better used on the finished grabbers to detect ripeness.
UncleOxidant · 19m ago
Yes, this. There's a certain way that ripe blakcberries (and raspberries) feel and pull away from the plant. After a while you just sort of understand the tactile sense of ripeness. So while this might pick blackberries without damaging them, I doubt they're going to be peak ripeness. Blackberries don't continue to ripen after they're picked so it's not like tomatoes where they can pick them kind of green and they ripen up by the time they hit the store.
helltone · 6h ago
Every time I see these headlines, the tech seems to be at least 10 years away from product.
- demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world.
- no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans.
- no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and repair costs
bob1029 · 4h ago
> no regards for economics
This is the #1 killer every time.
You will always find the most efficient farm machinery to be the least human-like in its design principles. The more it looks like something out of Mad Max the better.
Unless we come up with a machine like the combine harvester for blackberries, no one is going to be interested.
Loughla · 4h ago
>Unless we come up with a machine like the combine harvester for blackberries, no one is going to be interested.
Clarkson's farm taught me that this is already a thing.
Animats · 2h ago
There are several kinds of blueberry picking machines. There are air-blast pickers that blow the berries off the plant. There are ones with wheels of vibrating sticks. There are ones that get a comb around the plant and pull.
Some berries get damaged, yes. Some leaves and twigs get through. They're separated out by a very fast vision-based sorting machine before packing.[1] That's been standard technology for a decade or so.
Apple picking is still in the R&D stage.[2] Cost needs to come down to $0.02 per pick.
It's great to see startups in this area, but the thing has to work. There are too many failed ag robotics startups.[3] Ask "could you pressure-wash this thing"? If there are wires, electronics, and bearings exposed, it's still experimental.
Yes, powerwashing would be wanted. That's an IP69K, not too hard to hit with some basic mechanical protections.
Unless you need delicate sensors which need direct contact to samples to work.
Maybe it's not a complete necessity, but generally it's gonna be mixed in with big farm equipment that is power washed. The more you have to "coddle" the equipment the less cost effective it'll be for farmers.
Farm workers generally know how to wash themselves. Still I'd wage good money farm hands have used power washers on each other. Probably work well to clean off work coveralls!
EA-3167 · 6h ago
This is a classic example of University press releases, you learn to recognize the pattern. Someone who's skill set is PR gets a dumbed-down version of the science, and then converts that into a hype piece that ignores reality in favor of vague statements.
If you want the essence of this technique look at any university press release about fusion technology.
PaulHoule · 2h ago
... and if you ask them "got RSS?" they're the least likely to respond.
liawsjt · 6h ago
There doesn't appear to be anything unique about this particular soft gripper. This blog post is incredibly speculative and really based on nothing more than the author imagining that a grad student's prototype could some day be a single part in a vastly more complex system. There are entire companies that have spent tens of millions of dollars and man-centuries of work trying to pick only strawberries, and strawberries are a lot more durable than blackberries. Vision, motion planning, and controls are all significantly more difficult than gripper design.
ugh123 · 6h ago
The authors didn't test if the robot hand can harvest better than human. They said it "could one day".
They have not even developed the piece that finds and positions the hand.
>Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
dfltr · 6h ago
> ...and farm labor has been limited in recent years.
"Train routes across Germany have been a bit congested recently."
KevinMS · 17m ago
cheap labor creates its own demand. once its gone you'll see all kinds of things like this emerging.
autoexec · 6h ago
robots could do a lot of things better than humans... if the robots actually existed... and the problems/bugs/limitations were all worked out... and they had ready access to enough power to do the job... and they were affordable enough for anyone to bother... etc.
It's nice to dream about stuff we could maybe one day have I guess...
dmoy · 5h ago
I would settle for a robot that can kill blackberry bushes. Blackberries cut me so much, every time I go do maintenance on another noxious weed, English ivy which is busy killing all my trees
jahewson · 3h ago
I’m yet to see ivy kill a tree. I don’t get why people think this happens. It can certainly make them look ugly though.
dmoy · 1h ago
I've seen it and then seen the resulting dead tree fall on my house. Tree was already dead from ivy by the time I bought it. When I finally went back to cut it out, the biggest ivy were like 14cm diameter or bigger.
claudiulodro · 2h ago
I’ve seen it a bunch of times, but it’s almost always because the accumulated weight and size of the ivy makes the tree fall over in a good storm
blibble · 2h ago
I think that's called a goat
or a pig
robswc · 4h ago
I'll hold my breath, but this would be fantastic.
We need to automate away the boring/hard jobs.
Fomite · 7h ago
But can it harvest blackberries cheaper than humans?
whynotmaybe · 2h ago
Always the question I ask myself when I see the videos of pakistanis/indians building stuff with a huge workforce when the same are built in North America with very few people and a lot of automation.
We need a new law that merges baumol's cost disease and wright's law.
bendigedig · 7h ago
And is it going to harvest the free blackberries I'm enjoying when I go on a walk?
Like long haul trucking, only a matter of time until farming is largely autonomous. Companies like Lely, John Deere, and DeLaval pushing far ahead on this stuff.
mikestew · 7h ago
It’s a press release for a patent with a lot of “robot arm could…” and “once $THING_THAT_HASNT_HAPPENED happens…”, and the topper:
“Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.”
Keep your long sleeved shirts and overalls handy, because robots are not going to pick your blackberries for you anytime soon.
But it will be cool when they pull it off. I was just pondering the automation of blackberry picking, as they are starting to come on in the PNW, and I tire of getting scratched up.
amelius · 6h ago
Most of these ideas look great on paper, are easy to implement mechanically and then look great in the news, but then take years to become practical.
- demos done in a lab controlled environment without the crazy things that happen in a real world.
- no humans nearby so none of the safety features that would be needed should this thing work alongside/near humans.
- no regards for economics, expensive vision models, expensive hardware, no consideration for maintenance and repair costs
This is the #1 killer every time.
You will always find the most efficient farm machinery to be the least human-like in its design principles. The more it looks like something out of Mad Max the better.
Unless we come up with a machine like the combine harvester for blackberries, no one is going to be interested.
Good news! https://airharvesters.com/
Clarkson's farm taught me that this is already a thing.
Some berries get damaged, yes. Some leaves and twigs get through. They're separated out by a very fast vision-based sorting machine before packing.[1] That's been standard technology for a decade or so.
Apple picking is still in the R&D stage.[2] Cost needs to come down to $0.02 per pick.
It's great to see startups in this area, but the thing has to work. There are too many failed ag robotics startups.[3] Ask "could you pressure-wash this thing"? If there are wires, electronics, and bearings exposed, it's still experimental.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ica3FLAvPas
[2] https://goodfruit.com/lots-of-bots-video
[3] https://www.futurefarming.com/tech-in-focus/field-robots/cha...
Is that a necessary requirement? I mean, that would probably damage current harvesters, who are human people.
I mean, there are lots of parts of cars where pressure washing would probably force fluid into the bearings.
Might that not apply to hydraulic, pneumatic or electronic systems too?
(I do get what you're saying though)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-dOW2wn0rM
Unless you need delicate sensors which need direct contact to samples to work.
Maybe it's not a complete necessity, but generally it's gonna be mixed in with big farm equipment that is power washed. The more you have to "coddle" the equipment the less cost effective it'll be for farmers.
Farm workers generally know how to wash themselves. Still I'd wage good money farm hands have used power washers on each other. Probably work well to clean off work coveralls!
If you want the essence of this technique look at any university press release about fusion technology.
They have not even developed the piece that finds and positions the hand.
>Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.
"Train routes across Germany have been a bit congested recently."
It's nice to dream about stuff we could maybe one day have I guess...
or a pig
We need to automate away the boring/hard jobs.
We need a new law that merges baumol's cost disease and wright's law.
I don't think so.
https://mastodon.social/@UP8/114888883357697194
“Before the robot can be deployed on farms, the computer vision and positioning technologies that would let it find and reach for berries on the plant still need to be developed.”
Keep your long sleeved shirts and overalls handy, because robots are not going to pick your blackberries for you anytime soon.
But it will be cool when they pull it off. I was just pondering the automation of blackberry picking, as they are starting to come on in the PNW, and I tire of getting scratched up.