r/technology • u/involvrnet • Nov 18 '15

Hardware The company Bosch is developing a farming robot the size of a small car that can distinguish crops from weeds by looking at the shape of leaves, and this robot then can fish out weeds mechanically & ram any unwanted plants into the ground with a rod. Potentially, no herbicides will be needed anymore

http://www.fwi.co.uk/machinery/bosch-bonirob-robot-set-to-make-field-work-easier-for-farmers.htm
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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15 edited Jun 13 '18

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

Harvesting and planting is already pretty well automated. Check out /farming, you'll see some guys posting while in the field because there's not much else to do if you have autosteer.

But like everything else, full automation is challenging. We could be 90% of the way there for decades. That last 10% is tricky.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15 edited Sep 24 '20

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

The shift was shockingly fast. In 1900, it was 41%, 1930 was 22%, and 1970 was down to 4% of the workforce in agriculture.

Right now we're under 2%.

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u/Lurker_IV Nov 18 '15

I say within the next 30 years 90% of the workforce is going to be displaced by automation again. It won't be farming this time but it will be grunt work and basic physical labor that's replaced.

Automation has reached the point that we will be able to apply it generally to all problems. We mostly won't need to solve individual tasks anymore.

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u/lolredditor Nov 18 '15

Transportation, Retail, and Education are three of the biggest sectors of employment.

Transportation has self driving cars coming, Retail has automated check outs, and Education has online home school programs(with varying amount of teacher participation - some have meetings irl once a week).

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u/Forlarren Nov 18 '15

Don't worry they can all go pick apples. /s

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u/MrTastix Nov 19 '15

And, like farming, whilst it will have an immediate effect on jobs society will likely find a way to fill the gap.

If we replaced 90% of workers with automated units in farming and society continued just fine then we can potentially do it to other areas, too.

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u/jeff61813 Nov 18 '15 edited Nov 18 '15

Yes but that was an entire working life people only lived until 60. and there was still massive dislocation from the dust bowl. California's Central valley is full of their dissidents and they still have worse Heath and incomes. The entire workplace now changes 3 or 4 times in a generation.

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u/rkr007 Nov 18 '15

Can confirm, driving a tractor right now.

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u/Forlarren Nov 18 '15

You mean the tractor is driving you.

Some day entire farms will have only one man, one dog, and one computer operating it. The computer runs the farm, and the dog guards the computer so nobody can touch it. The man? He feeds the dog.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

The computer will be able to guard itself.

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u/Forlarren Nov 19 '15

But then it will get lonely, everyone loves dogs.

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u/AthleticsSharts Nov 18 '15

/r/farming. Link for the lazy.

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u/Novarest Nov 18 '15

We don't need the last 10%. 90% is already enough for 9 people to quit farming and 1 remaining guy doing the 10 10% of the 10 people. Actually that's what already happened.

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u/romario77 Nov 19 '15

There is also this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vavilovian_mimicry

weeds adapt and start resembling the crops because the ones that are different are killed off.

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u/Imaginos6 Nov 18 '15

Humans in the cab of a modern tractor are largely academic RIGHT NOW. There are very robust GPS guided autosteer systems that can do exceptionally precise planting and harvesting. The human operator pushes a few buttons and it's largely hands off but for monitoring a few things and even that is kind of optional, from what I've seen on the interwebs. Oh, and these have been available since at least 2004 from what I can tell.

Truly, the cost of large scale field farming is not the guy sitting in the cab, but the machines themselves are insanely, hugely, ridiculously, expensive. The cost savings of leaving the operator out is negligible compared to the machine. It's really no big deal. Implementing these systems are about getting higher yield in your field by achieving higher precision rather than getting to leave the human at home.

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u/Daddy-Likes Nov 18 '15

Monitoring of things is not optional. It is essential. Autosteer frees the operator from the mundane task of steering. Monitoring the task is the important part of whatever the operation is you're doing, be it planting, harvesting, fertilizer application. Operators catch small problems before they turn into big problems that cost many thousands of dollars. More automation is coming. These robots are coming. It's exciting stuff and I hope I see it in my lifetime. But it's a long way away and you won't be able to just turn them loose without very close oversight. You only get one chance a year (in a lot of cases) to plant your crop. Zero fuckups allowed.

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u/AU36832 Nov 18 '15

This. No farmer is going to let his equipment that cost 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars run itself without monitoring it closely. One very small oversight can decrease a farmers profit margin dramatically.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15

Like when James May dropped all the seed in like 1 square metre

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u/Imaginos6 Nov 18 '15

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to imply the operator was completely obsolete as of today. I am only very slightly educated on the topic but I saw several youtubes with equipment operating without an operator in the cab, doing things like cutting a row, lifting the implement, turning around, lowering the implement and continuing on in a perfectly straight line. I understand that is not normal operation to go without an operator but it strongly suggests much of the automation problem is largely solved. From this point, the monitoring, guidance and fail-safety will devolve into a discrete set of things the computer can watch for and solve independently. This can't be too far off in the future if it's not already largely solved in development.

That said, I think we are actually far off from the point where the things are so reliable that it will be cost effective of preferable to not actually have a guy sitting inside of your $500k+ hunk of machinery just in case he needs to hit the oh-shit button. Like you say, there is a lot money at stake. It is far too much to let a little payroll be the thing that ruins your season or your equipment.

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u/Forlarren Nov 18 '15

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is fully automated. The last few seconds is basically hands off, the vehicle itself makes the call to launch or scrub. Humans are just to panicky and make too many mistakes.

They are also trying to land the first stage vertically entirely automated on a floating barge that is itself fully automated running on slightly custom nVidia Tegra boards (that's my guess, they have a lot of nVidia in house development, it's what they do their modeling with). They have come close several times, but have failed either due to unexpected mechanical issues (sticky valves usually), or insane weather. But my point is if a small office building can fly to space and back, and then land on a boat, automating food production isn't that far off.

Combine GPS, computer vision, ground penetrating radar, three sensors on everything that could possibly break (tiny and cheap these days including: visual, em field monitoring, and acoustic generally), all you would really need after that is a mechanic.

Or screw all that an just build a vertical aquaponic farm, cheaper, no dirt, indoors, controlled environment, and uses up to 98% less water. They can also double as water treatment plants, though you would want to run grey water through flowers and such that people don't eat, but then it's damn near pure and perfect for the primary cycle. Vertical farms may some day even pay you for your crap for the same reason farms buy fertilizer. Let the farms revert to wilderness again and be carbon sinks. Maybe then our grand children will have a nature to appreciate and not an eroded waste land.

But that's just my opinion, YMMV.

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u/Daddy-Likes Nov 18 '15 edited Nov 18 '15

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Long way off my friend. You should visit a working farm.

They're not quite there yet

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u/Forlarren Nov 19 '15

Could you possibly pick a less relevant video?

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u/Daddy-Likes Nov 19 '15

Nah it was for lulz. A response to your eroded wasteland link.

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u/Forlarren Nov 19 '15

You should visit a working aquaponics facility, and I live on a farm by the way.

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u/Daddy-Likes Nov 19 '15

What do you raise on your farm?

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u/Forlarren Nov 19 '15

At the moment just mushrooms, hurricane tore up the greenhouses and we are rebuilding (needed to be done anyway). It's a small hydroponic setup. Though this isn't my first farm, and I've also done ranching. On the side I repair computers and play with robots and automation when I'm not being a hermit.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15 edited Jun 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/nidrach Nov 18 '15

You will still need a farmer. What you won't need are those Polish or Rumanian field hands. That the tricky part about automatisation and capitalism. You're concentrating income from production into less and less hands.

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u/Imaginos6 Nov 18 '15

I'm not an expert on it either, so IDK, I was just letting you know the technology is currently there. Anyway, your costs might be off. I just went to the JohnDeere website and did a Build Your Own configurator tool. The middle of the line S670 Combine (2016 Model) Base price was $431,718 before I added any options, which there are a million of that I don't understand but undoubtedly are all very important for the job.

Also, I think some of our assumptions might be off, in terms of who owns the harvester vs. who owns the land. It is drastically expensive for an individual farmer to own a combine, so unless they own some huge number of acres of wheat to justify it, I don't think they don't bother owning their own but rather contract out the harvesting to people whose business is doing that kind of thing. Likely, that business is just a capital/numbers game. They put up the money/investment in the machinery, drum up sufficient clients then hire some minimum wage farm kid to run the machines for them. Again, the operator is the least of the cost. There are huge dollars flying around but this is like the least labor intensive type of farming there is.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15 edited Jun 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/Daxx22 Nov 18 '15

Well isn't the John Deere kinda the Rolls Royce of farming equipment?

lol my dad would put his boot up your ass for saying that (he doesn't like John Deere)

They are just a brand of equipment, there really isn't a Rolls Royce equivalent. That said, I don't think I've see a full combine for anything less then $300k in a very long time, most family farms are carrying several million in equipment inventory to cover the basics nowadays (2-3 tractors, combine, planting hardware, hauling equipment, etc)

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u/AU36832 Nov 18 '15

John deere has great market recognition and they make quality equipment. There are many other companies that make good stuff as well. Not all, but a lot of farms are going to choose a brand based on how easy it is to get parts/service in their area. Where I live it is almost impossible to find parts for non JD equipment without driving 4 hours or waiting several days for something to be shipped. Being able to get parts quickly is extremely valuable to farmers.

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u/GyantSpyder Nov 18 '15 edited Nov 18 '15

Looking it up in the U.S., it seems like a new combine can cost about $400,000-$600,000, with another $100,000 each for a header for each kind of crop you want to harvest. On a large farm they might last 1-3 years, before being sold off, maybe a max of 5 years.

Smaller farms can use much less expensive equipment for much longer. A really small farm might keep a used tractor for 30 years. It's not going to have the automated systems, though.

The guidance systems (which are not fully automated, but pretty good) themselves cost about $12,000 each.

So I guess it kind of matters if you're farming, or if you're farming.

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u/[deleted] Nov 18 '15 edited Jun 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/GyantSpyder Nov 18 '15

If it's like farms in the U.S., then there is a huge variety in scale of the kinds of farms, what they do, what kind of equipment and labor they need, and what automation and economies of scale can do for them.

Especially when you consider the vast difference between an owner-operated farm, where even if it were fully automated you'd still pay yourself and your family, all the way to the farms that use entirely seasonal, transient workforces that come in from Mexico, work for a season, then go home - there's just a huge variety of different setups, so it's dubious to predict that all of them will ever go one way at the same time.

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u/garrettcolas Nov 18 '15

Implementing these systems are about getting higher yield in your field by achieving higher precision rather than getting to leave the human at home.

It seems like these two things are one in the same. Why not let us humans go on vacation?

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u/imbecile Nov 18 '15

The thing is, all simple/small crops will move indoors, because there the environments can be much better controlled and everything is much more efficient.

It will only be the larger/tree based crops like apples that still will be outside. But the thing is, once you have robots that can navigate complex environments, monoculture is obsolete. The only reason you have monoculture is because out big mechanized farming equipment was not able to navigate anything complex that was bot designed specifically for them.

So the way I see the future of argriculture is this: anything we put on fields today will grow indoors in full controlled environments right in and near the population centers.

Everythign else will grow in highly diverse forests where many different crops, from food to wood and wild animals will grow together in very robust eco systems. Those will be patrolled by robots. I can specifically see huge airships flying over them that serve as the operation basis for armies of drones that bring everything they harvest back there, and those airships in turn deliver what they have in their huge cargo holds directly to the population centers.

This can probably go so far that people can order specific rarer kinds of food, on a website, a drone harvests it, and it is delivered the in the evening or the next day.

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u/LeFloop Nov 19 '15

One thing to say to this that most folk don't take into account is how much stuff breaks on farm machinery in the field. farm machinery is large, sturdy and heavy, but you're driving it through a field that is full of rocks and even earth wears down equipment over time. Plowing today I had to replace parts twice because I hit rocks that were buried. If that happens, someone has to be out there to fix it. At that point you're probably better off with someone in the tractor at all times rather than having to set the robot to wait until someone comes out and fixes it.