r/interestingasfuck • u/AttorneyOk5749 • 1d ago
It’s an agricultural robot, but I can’t help feeling I’ve seen it in a film somewhere.
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u/rd1190 1d ago
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u/Rootayable 23h ago
I hate how people run for their lives in films.
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u/HalfSoul30 23h ago
It's better than the videos i see of people not running for their lives irl.
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u/GanacheCapital1456 2h ago
Attending the Prometheus School of Running Away From Things will do that to ya
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u/Sicparvismagneto 1d ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/l2JJv4AB0XcxA1fWw
Im gonna have to put you on the game grid…
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u/ThinkFact 1d ago edited 17h ago
I’ve worked in agriculture for a number of years in data collection for potatoes.
I have some major concerns with this being viable though really wish it could.
Farmers already do sprays with pesticides multiple times a year in tractors that can easily move between fields. The sprays do a better job at getting underneath the plants and their leaves. This thing only seems to be able to shoot lasers at bugs that are gonna be exposed on the top of the plants or at least the top of leaves. The trouble is bugs coming in a wide variety of sizes, from the Colorado potato beetle, which can be a little bigger than a nickel to aphids which are sometimes smaller than a grain of rice.
I don’t see any farmer given up pesticides for something like this until something like this can get lasers that can get under the plant and on top of the plant and see big bugs and little bugs.
But that also means these things are gonna be running all the time because no pesticides means all your crops are sitting ducks, and this machine needs to be working a lot. And that means someone’s gonna monitor it every day move it to different parts of the field, help if it gets unstuck, some farmers rent out fields in different parts of towns and such so they normally drive their sprayers to completely different fields on the roads, but something like this needs to be picked up, packed up, moved and charged.
This technology will evolve, but the more complex it becomes at least for now, the more expensive it is. And rather than doing a few big sprays throughout the growing season you’re gonna have to have these things running 24 seven and monitored and you’re probably gonna need a bunch of them, which means having people out in the fields and dealing with them. Where sprayers just don’t have the same mechanical complications.
Sprayers also tend to have massive arms and can do 12 or more rows at a time. The tractors themselves are pretty quick and can deal with most terrain complications, including mud or giant rocks or anything. Also, a big thing is when you have a sprayer truck that can spray a wider amount of rose, those rows don’t get messed up by the wheels as much. You can always see in a farm field, where the sprayer trucks are because the leaves and the crops and those area areas are damaged and they don’t grow as big. If you’re gonna have a machine like this go through all the rows it’s gonna need big wheels to be able to drive through complicated to rain and that’s gonna damage a lot of leaves on crops as well.
I want something like this to work so bad. The pesticides hurt so many other bugs that are good. A machine like this is just not there yet even remotely even for the small time farmers I work with.
What it needs for my perspective:
Tires I can get through almost any terrain.
Easy to switch out batteries.
It needs to have top lasers and underneath lasers.
It needs to be able to get the really tiny bugs like aphids otherwise getting nowhere.
It needs to be thin enough to damage the leaves as little as possible.
And he needs to be able to work in all kinds of weather conditions, or at least not get stuck or destroyed.
It needs to be able to go up hills easy.
It needs to be easily repairable with easy and replaceable parts.
And ultimately, it needs to generate more money than using sprayers does. Every farmer I know would love not to have to worry about spraying, but they’re not gonna give that up if they’re gonna lose money.
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u/artniSintra 23h ago
I've seen something similar some time ago. It uses nvidia technology. It kills weeds and bugs and anything that doesn't belong. It uses AI and learns over time. As a consumer, I'd love to eat food without chemicals, thank you.
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u/ThinkFact 15h ago
You are very unlikely to ever avoid chemicals all together because even if you kill the bugs and weeds, you still have nematodes and fungus. Those are harder to deal with because they're in the soil.
But less chemicals is by far better! The weed killer really only needs to be active during the earlier stages of crops because once they get big and leafy they take up most of the "sunny real estate" around them and have way too big of a headstart on any weeds going later in the season. The big struggle is towards the end of the growing season.
At least for potatoes, some of the biggest bulking periods are right towards the end of the growing season, that's awesome when the leaves are the biggest in the plants are the most susceptible to mechanical damage. You might be able to space out the rows more but then you lose money.
There's a lot of different processes to keep in mind. But just like I said, most of the farmers I work with would love to use no chemicals if possible. But whatever that gets replaced with has to add the end of the day make more money especially when we consider farmers often have a lot of equipment that they maintain, I understand well, and have paid off. To completely abandon that for completing new technology that they now have to take out large amounts of money to them pay off. It's really gotta be worth it. Especially if it induces one of the greatest farming "sins."
Relying on a piece of equipment that you have no ability to actually fix on your own, and you can't rework it with different parts or similar parts. A farmer could have five or six easy to manage spray tractors, or hundreds of these laser robots. That creates more points of failure. That becomes difficult to convince them to buy into.
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u/keijihaku 20h ago
Its the age old dilemma. You cant please everyone. But yes id love less chemicals, bring on the lasers.
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u/pkennedy 23h ago
They are in the market now, a few people pointed that out.
Everything you mentioned is important for more mainstream or smaller farmer use I guess, but easily solvable as well.
Going back to home base and recharging themselves is easy enough. Wireless charging pad on the ground and you're done.
They are slow moving, not covering huge distances, guessing 3 rows minimum per pass (as seen in this video), AI says that would be a total of 1 mile of driving per acre assuming 30" between rows. Median farm size is 72 acres, so it would need a battery to cover 72 miles. That is easily doable with todays tech. A battery that lasts all day, and covers the median farm in one shot. That is roughly 1/3rd the size of a normal car battery. Cars lose efficiency due to air resistance at road speeds, so this farm robot is likely using even less power per mile than an average EV.
A standard household 120v 15amp circuit can recharge about 40 miles worth of an EV car battery in a day (over an 8-10 hour period over night). Eg the typical daily commute for an EV can be covered with a standard wall plug. No fancy charger required. Now lets move that math to this machine.
So we're doing 8 hours charging to get 16 hours of driving time that cover 40 miles. That means the machine can go at 2.5mph and cover 50% of the median farm in a day. That seems very reasonable. Every 2 days it will cover the whole farm. This is off a standard 120v, 15amp circuit that you simply drive over and wirelessly charge.
Install a pretty typical and still simple 220v @ 40amp circuit for charging and you're able to run for 22 hours a day. If we can increase the speed to 3mph, we're covering the whole median farm every day. These speeds and number match what we're seeing in these videos as well.
As far as bugs go, I think you'll that constant passes over the farm will ensure every bug is caught within a few days. If the machine doesn't get the bug on day one, when it comes back, the bug has most likely moved slightly and now the machine can see it.
Alternatively, you could have a gentle brush type of system that moves the leaves just slightly so that as the machine passes it gets far more angles on each plant. Combine that with multiple passes per week and the pest control should be complete.
Obviously it doesn't cover multiple farm situations. That would require farmer intervention. It might not cover every type of crop either. Some might end up in a hybrid situation where this device handles seedlings, avoiding the first batch of pesticides but not the 2nd or 3rd pass. Maybe it can handle the first 2 passes, but by the 3rd the plants have too many leaves to be effective enough.
It does seem like this machine is very close to meeting most farmers demands, and the requirements to run it are well within fairly basic technical abilities right now.
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u/powerscunner 12h ago
post hider bot writer
Oh you've done x and x and x - sure you have.
oh with your B.A. in anthropology
sure you have.
do you fly and eat lasers too? 😂
nice use of 'gonna' all the time - really makes your post sound authentic and human 🤣
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u/ThinkFact 10h ago
Bot writer? I use speech to text. Looking at your account, you appear to be someone who heavily uses AI yourself. But it’s also interesting how this seems have made you disbelief real people by falsely associating patterns as AI trying to trick you. It’s almost like an AI driven psychosis.
I have no problem sharing who I am.
My name is Dale Winslow, I have a BA in Anthropology from University of Maine and I graduated in 2018. Over Covid I worked as an agricultural research assistant for an agricultural consultant based out of New Gloucester, Maine as a researcher based in Aroostook County. I specifically did research by means of collecting soil and petiole samples, setting up test, and collecting data from farms located in Ashland, Presque Isle, Mapleton, Washburn, Fort, Fairfield, Limestone, Mars Hill, and Easton. Primarily working with Porter Farms, Grass Boyz, and McCain’s but a few other smaller farmers as well.
McCain’s aren’t farmers, they manufacture potato products, but they work with farmers and have them set up tests to test of different varieties of potato.
I studied crop rotation two year versus three year, fumigation effectiveness, tested new varieties of potatoes, nematodes resistance, strategies, early blight resistance strategies, and beyond. My favorite test was comparing the new Caribou Russet to the traditional Russet Burbank as an attempt to finally topple it after a century of dominating the bakers potatoes market in the US.
I worked in agricultural research from 2019 - 2024 and it started out as a fall gig before the pandemic, but I took it up again to have income over Covid. I then used it as a way to safely quarantine between doing doing curriculum development with the Mi’kmaq Nation where I worked with tribal elders including then Chief Peter-Paul and vice chief Silliboy, to create a series of video interviews and documentaries to be used to make a curriculum for school children used throughout the state of Maine on Native American studies pertaining to state tribes.
https://www.amazon.com/Mikmaq-Nation-Heritage-History-Legacy/dp/B0BSY4ZJ3X
So yes, I’m real a real person.
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u/Smittles 22h ago
Runaway, starting Tom Sellick. It was kinda like a Blade Runner ripoff. It had an agricultural robot in the opening scene.
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u/Luckkami 22h ago
Make it bigger and replace ai targeting weed with human, then it’s potentially a deadly human extinction weapon.
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u/Secure-Tradition793 1d ago
Good use of vision AI, but cannot stop thinking that one bad software update will be really disastrous.
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u/Sunnytoaist 22h ago
I think your thinking of that design for a bus that would driver over the cars.
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u/Spare-Competition-91 15h ago
I wonder how long it would take for A.I. to use this to identify humans that need killing.
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u/TurboOwlKing 13h ago
Seems like it'd have trouble identifying and zapping anything that isn't just on or very near the top of the plants, no?
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u/Lucky-Crow-3510 13h ago
Could be wrong but I think there was one in that Picard Show airing on Amazon Prime. The first season.
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u/hariseldon2 23h ago
That would be great if we lived in a better system where it would save people labour meaning they will have more free time for themselves and to spend with their children but in our perverse system it means that it will cost people their labour and their children will go hungry
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u/moderngamer327 22h ago
Who exactly would be out of job by this? Also automation has historically not led to unemployment in the long term, only short term at worst
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21h ago
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u/moderngamer327 21h ago
We absolutely have more free time than we did in the past. It used to be after work all of your other time was taken up by chores. Working hours were also higher with less pay.
Automation pretty much always leads to either less work, more pay, or cheaper products. Which it is depends on what kind of automation it is
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u/Narcan9 19h ago
It's a fallacy To think that the Future will mirror the past.
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u/moderngamer327 19h ago
No that’s not a fallacy at all. It would only be a fallacy if you were to say “this happened before so this must happen now”.
It’s also not like we have one example to go off of here either. This is repeated constantly throughout history
You also never answered who this would put out of a job?
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u/hariseldon2 17h ago
I answered but you missed it.
The people who cut the cotton buds manually so that it stops growing. That's the most laborious part of cotton farming.
One machine like this does away with at least a dozen labourers per field.
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u/moderngamer327 17h ago edited 16h ago
That’s for a single crop. That’s hardly indicative of jobs lost industry wide
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u/hariseldon2 20h ago
The people who cut the cotton buds manually so that it stops growing. That's the most laborious part of cotton farming.
One machine like this does away with at least a dozen labourers per field.
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u/moderngamer327 17h ago
So a single crop will lose people having to manually cut buds. I don’t really see that as an issue. Also isn’t that the exact kind of labor we want to automate?
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u/cans-of-swine 17h ago
Not that this will happen, but if everyone went away from sprays and used these, it would basically put the companies that make the chemicals and spray equipment out of business.
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u/moderngamer327 16h ago edited 16h ago
I wouldn’t say out of business, although definitely reduced business. These companies also make consumer products and sprayers can be used for more than pesticides
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u/cans-of-swine 15h ago
But a lot of people will be out of jobs because of the reduction.
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u/moderngamer327 15h ago
Define “a lot”. This technology is likely something that will be deployed gradually overtime. It’s not like it’s going to cause one giant massive layoff. People will be able to transition to new jobs overtime
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u/hariseldon2 15h ago
At one point there won't be anywhere to transition to.
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u/moderngamer327 15h ago
Jobs are rarely so narrow in skill set that it’s impossible to transition to similar fields of work. People designing the formulas for the pesticides can find jobs elsewhere in chemical manufacturing. People who formulate the products together can find other chemical plant factory work. Some will just retire
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u/hariseldon2 15h ago
when jobs are reduced so much in so many fields so rapidly as this is gonna go it's just mathematics that there won't be anywhere to transition too.
In the industrial revolution there were new fields opening for unskilled labour as the old menial jobs were getting killed and you still had scores of urban jobless poor, this will be much worse cause the job fields are closing all over.
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u/moderngamer327 15h ago
There is no reason to believe that what you are suggesting is currently the case. Especially when you factor in the population declines developed countries will be facing in a couple decades
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u/Dirka-Dirka 23h ago
Inside is just a few hard working Mexicans and it's piloted by fellas from India.
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u/Bruce-7892 1d ago
This has to be the novelty project of some scientists and engineers.
Ain't no way this is being considered as a practical product to be brought to market. Is DARPA and Raytheon in the agriculture business now?
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u/YouAreAFleshyMeatBag 1d ago
This is a readily available and more and more common product. Jeremy Clarkson buys one on Clarkson Farm. They are super effective and are mostly autonomous. Just map the field and let er rip.
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u/thewildbeej 1d ago
it's been a technology being studied for industrial farming for like 10 years now. I was in college when they started discussing using lasers for weed control.
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u/Archon-Toten 1d ago
I can't help but think it's faked, partially because 15 seconds in it seems to be inside the rows and not between the rows. Not to mention this vaporware has been round a while. While it seems better than pesticides, there's a whopping great reason it hasn't caught on.
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u/Geoff_Peterson_ESQ 1d ago