Posted on 09/30/2013 12:53:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A robot that picks ripe strawberries while farmers sleep has been unveiled with claims it could cut workloads by two-thirds.
The device, unveiled Wednesday, can pick a piece of fruit every eight seconds by using three cameras to determine which strawberries are ready to pick. A mechanized arm then darts out to snip each one free and place it into its basket.
The 2-meter robot moves on rails between rows of strawberries, which in Japan are usually grown in elevated greenhouse planters.
It “calculates the degree of ripeness from the color of the strawberry, which it observes with two digital cameras,” said Mitsutaka Kurita, an official at Shibuya Seiki, the developer of the machine.
“It also uses the images from the two cameras to calculate the distance from the target, then approaches the strawberry it is aiming at,” he said.
A third camera takes a detailed photo of the fruit, which it uses for the final calculation before moving in to snip it.
(Excerpt) Read more at japantimes.co.jp ...
In related news it has been announced that the cost of vasectomies are predicted to get much cheaper due to new medical technology that is an outgrowth of framing technology.
Upon hearing this, ex-president Bill Clinton was heard to say “Awesome”.
Well, it doesn’t matter whether they believe it or not. It would be true.
When George the Younger presided over generous increases in adoption tax credits, the hourly adoption lawyers rate shot up 50% overnight. Most of the agencies also had massive increases. But it wasn’t a tax. With a tax, the governemtn gets the increase, even if it is just going to hand everything over.
By the way, at no point in this whole thread did I ever support a protective tariff. I’m simply stating what it is and what it isn’t.
I’ll feel better, as I pay much higher prices, that it’s not a tax.
Well, you stated that, “tariffs tax stuff made outside the country that people here buy,” which fundamentally is incorrect, as I demonstrated.
“Until our FR protectionists roll in, and claim that we need the jobs.”
Someone has to build the robots that build the robots that build the robot strawberry pickers.
Just don’t use imported rubber for the tires . . . someone like me might come-along and claim that the higher price is a tax.
LOL—so what should they be called, “transfer payments?” LOL, again.
“Making illegal aliens undocumented workers irrelevant?”
Your sorry PC ass, THEY ARE ILLEGAL ALIENS AND CRIMINALS!!!!!
They can take it on faith, just like your suggestion that "prices would moderate," in a market with government intervention. LOLOL
Let me tell you how it will be. There’s one for you, nineteen for me. Sorry, after the Strawberry Fields comments I couldn’t resist.
ONCE I CONVERSED WITH A GROUP OF AG. ENGINEERS AND THEY TOLD ME THIS:..’THERE IS NOT ONE CROP THAT WE CANNOT DESIGN A MACHINE TO REAP SUCCESSFULLY, NOT ONE VEGETABLE OR FRUIT SO FRAGILE, THAT CANNOT BE SAFELY, SUCCESSFULLY PICKED’
CONSIDER THE IMPORT OF THOSE WORDS:
THAT MEANS THAT ALL THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE IS TO PROVIDE THE NECESSARY FEDERAL FUNDING TO DEVELOP THESE MACHINES AND THEN TURN THEM OVER, FREE OF CHARGE, TO THE US FARMERS WHO NEED THEM....!
THE IMMIGRANT PROBLEM IS SOLVED FORTHWITH! NO MORE DANGEROUS IMMIGRANTS WHO SUCK THE WELFARE SYSTEM DRY...AND PREY ON THE POPULACE AND COST BILLIONS IN WELFARE AND JAIL COSTS...
WASHINGTON ARE YOU LISTENING TO THIS?
sweet! guess we wont need all those pickers from south of the border anymore!
making robots to do the jobs American wont! the American way :P
Most of the time, you can assume that pro-leftists views on FR don’t need the < / sarc > tag.
I have a better idea:
Those dippy liberal arts majors who can’t repay their student loans? Let’s give ‘em this job as a condition of assistance packages on their loans.
They’d learn two very important lessons in just one season in the field.
Tomatoes have been mechanically harvested in California for some time. This is why today’s tomatoes taste tough and lifeless, compared to tomatoes of, oh, 30 years ago.
They’re also harvested green, so as to remain tough enough to survive mechanical processing and transportation handling.
The tomatoes that are harvested ripe red are usually taken by large dump trucks to the plants where they’re turned into sauces, soups, etc. They’re stacked deep enough in these end-dump trucks with plastic liners that there’s tomato juice/guts leaking out of the truck the whole time it is rolling down the road.
Having actually been a farmer (unlike most people who like to bloviate about farming on FR), I’m not in the least concerned with mechanized ag.
In fact, most farmers would rather buy equipment than hire field labor if they can make it pencil in five to seven years’ time (or less). Field labor is a whole lot of headache on two feet. They’re late, they’ve been doing drugs or they’re drunk, they don’t show up, they do stupid things while on the job, etc. In today’s environment, unskilled labor is a huge liability for capital-intensive businesses. There was never a shortage of “potential labor” that showed up at our farm gate, looking for work. 99% of them never made it past the gate, because one glance at their face told me that they were either an alcoholic or a meth-head, and I never saw any point in hiring people who were in a chemically altered state to operate equipment costing me between $10K to $90K per machine.
The single biggest problem for the California strawberry industry (which grows the majority of US strawberries) isn’t labor or mechanized costs, it’s the environmentalists who have put treaties and plans in place to ban the use of methyl bromide fumigants. Without that treatment for soil pathogens, eventually large-scale strawberry production in California will basically cease and the land will go into other crops. Strawberry production will go to Mexico. It’s probably about five years off - the soils will be able to grow economically viable strawberry crops for another three to five years with the expensive (and less effective) substitutes for methyl bromide, but one of the better ones (methyl iodide) was pulled off the market by the Japanese company that made it without warning the producers this past year.
Yea. I’ve seen this on field trips to visit California farmers, especially in the El Centro/Imperial Valley region.
It does not give one confidence in the food supply. At all.
BTW, you should see what the water flowing north of the border into the marshlands from Mexico looks like. Oh, the stench. The sanitation in Mexico has to be horrible to put that sort of effluent downstream.
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