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Agricultural robotics research fellow Dr Christopher Lehnert spoke at CQUniversity yesterday about robots being developed to pick fruit and detect weeds.
One problem they could solve was harvesting labour shortages.
"It's a causal workforce problem. (For farmers) their really high risk is getting a workforce to pick the fruit," Mr Lehnert said.
"There's not a worry about job losses. We're just shifting the paradigm. Instead of being in the field, they will control robots."
He hoped to be well on the way towards a commercial fruit-picking design by the end of next year.
Another part of his research was designing robots for broadacre weed management.
"We are looking at taking the human out of the tractor and getting an autonomous platform," he said.
"The large machines they use on farms do a lot of damage to the soil. They compact the soils and destroy them.
"But robots would be smaller, they wouldn't cause this issue."
Hmm, this kind of thing didn't end well for the Quarians...
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 12 2015, @10:21AM
It's a matter of cost !
Not really, no. Yes, you will have less trouble finding people the more you pay for the job, but the market for fruit does not bear arbitrary cost. The more you pay the people who pick the fruit, the more you have to ask for the fruit. Higher price equals less demand due to substitution effects. Initially, higher payment means you can pick and sell more fruit, but only until you exceed demand. Since demand decreases as you pay more for picking, there naturally is an equilibrium where you can't "just pay more to find enough pickers". So it is an actual risk: The amount of fruit you can sell depends on the willingness of the pickers to work for a given wage.
(Score: 2) by jcross on Monday July 13 2015, @01:43AM
Add to that the fact that with fruit your production capacity takes years to change. You can't just plant more trees and have a bigger crop next year, and if you stop tending to some of the trees you already have to reduce production cost, you're making a big beach-head for blights and pests to invade the whole orchard. Plus the crop rots in the field if you don't pick it right on time. It seems like it might be a fairly shitty business to be in.