Recently, a video has caused discussion in the media. In an apple orchard abroad, six robotic hands pick ripe apples skillfully and quickly amidst the hum of machinery.
This is an apple picking robot provided by Advanced Farm Technologies, a cutting-edge agricultural company founded in 2018 in California, U.S.A. Six robotic arms identify and pick apples at a rate of 2,500 apples per hour [2].
Unlike humanoid robots that open bottle caps and dance shows in society's playful opinion. The moment you see this alien robot.Everyone feels threatened. It'll take our jobs.[1]。
Products
The robot is powered by a four-wheeled hybrid mobile platform that provides auto-navigated movement with apple storage.
Stereo camera that provides video streaming for AI visual recognition.
A robotic arm with a total of 6 adsorbent soft gripper jaws on both sides and a working range of (2.74m-3.65m) is used to pick ripe apples while minimizing apple damage.
The selected apples are sent to the fruit baskets via a conveyor belt on the platform, and finally the platform unloads the filled baskets.
Its robotic arm is designed to be very slim, fast and less likely to be obstructed by branches.
Approximately 2,500 apples are picked per hour. Based on 200g of individual apples, that's a total of 500 kilograms of apples.
market analysis
One machine replaces 60 people.
Take our country's situation as an example.2022 "I Love Invention" program in Guizhou, said that the young labor force is not willing to do apple picking work, most of the workers are the old people left behind in the countryside, the work is not efficient, resulting in the ripening season, a considerable portion of the apples can not be picked, rotting on the tree. Fruit farmers suffer huge losses [6].
In "I Love Inventions", 3 workers picked 37 baskets of apples in one day. The author visually estimated that there were about 80 in a basket. In other words, the average person picks about 1,000 fruits a day.
People only work 8 hours, machines can work 24 hours straight. Therefore, one machine can replace 2500*24/1000 = 60 people in a day.
Industry Issues
There are two major problems in the apple machine picking industry. The orchard and the robots have to work with each other, and the AI training problem.
Before the machine can operate, it needs to prune the branches at the bottom of the fruit tree that extend out into the road ahead of time, removing some of the leaves that cover the apples. Fruit trees usually have thick branches at the bottom, and if these branches extend beyond the general contour of the tree, they may interfere with the robot's scanning for new fruit to be picked. If a fruit tree has too many leaves, this can lead to less efficient machine recognition.
Apple varieties vary between orchards, and switching orchard operations requires re-collecting data and training AI models. However, due to the large number of varieties and short picking season, it is challenging to maintain speed.
Collaborating with growers for data collection and fruit tree pruning [2]. Work with annotation companies that can return 50,000 image annotations in 24 hours for AI training [5].
concluding remarks
What can a humanoid robot do? Do robots have to be humanoid?
The history of the development of human society is a history of the development of tools. From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, every innovation in tools has greatly contributed to the progress of society. We need fruit boxes, we need wheels, we need more arms, which created apple picking robots.
Show answers.Not robots that act like people, go deeper into the industry and make robots that solve industry problems。
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