AI robotic strawberry and raspberry picker

not sure if there is a video of the strawberry picker, but it works at night, runs on diesel and is completely functional.

this is the raspberry picker https://twitter.com/RobotAndAIWorld/status/1132765437782122502

i said this years ago, but this is what is going to transform permaculture, it will completely negate the harvesting issue.

they are 'smart' enough to know what is ripe and what is not, its just a matter of programming now that the robotics have been worked out.

Sure it will transform permaculture if the raspberries are all in lovely straight rows with neatly mown grass between each row and there is nothing in the way or possible to confuse with the raspberry. and there's a log way to go until that things up to speed, the caption says 10 seconds the video shows over a minute for one berry.


Is a link to the strawberry picker, Yes it looks like it works nicely, but surely that is the antithesis of permaculture? huge mono-cultures growing on covered ground heavily sprayed artificially fed and watered.

I'm confused as to how this is relevant to permaculture.

because there is a labor issue involved in harvesting all this 'unorganized' flora, and i would be much more confident if i wasn't reliant upon volunteer labor if i was trying to manage some sort of production. on top of which, its obvious to me, but this would put permaculture into a large scale potential and 'out of the backyard'. this literally has the potential to 'save the planet'. we all well know how devastating the monocultural systems are.

this is just a simple programming difference, the strawberry picker is completely functional, and obviously the robotics have caught up. meaning programming for a polyculture is not so far of from realizing the difference between ripe and unripe strawberries vs an apple and a blueberry. i understand the techonology and software behind it, so maybe its easier for me to 'see' but i don't really have a simple way to explain all that.

you could have a diverse polyculture on a large scale and have "smart AI harvester robots" manage acres and acres, that the simple row crop harvesting machines we have currently are unable to manage.

there are also systems like miracle harms or mark shepards that are not vastly complex and would be a good 'starting point'.

this is how it pertains to permaculture. i've been waiting for this for years. most ironic part is that the strawberry farmer did this out of necessity, developed over seven years because of labor issues.

i'm unclear about the bias against this, maybe someone can give me some insight there

----edit
again, maybe i'm missing something, but this just seems obvious 'breakthrough' to me, the strawberry farmer developed this on his own.  Maybe this isn't in the right sub forus, but when i did a search, similar topics were posted under these subforums.

The way I see it, a diesel-powered industrial robot that picks fruit very slowly in a highly-structured monoculture isn't in itself relevant to permaculture, but it's a marker of things to come that very much might be.

Technology has a way of getting faster, lighter, cheaper, smarter, and more efficient.  And, it is devoutly to be wished, more sustainable in its design, manufacture, operation, materials sourcing, and end-of-life destination.  

If this unit has solved the hard problem (getting a machine to distinguish and successfully handle the ripe berry) there will soon be other units that do it better, faster, cheaper, and under more complicated circumstances.  Including -- this would be the permaculture dream -- in a polyculture.  Imagine a solar-powered quadcopter that docks on your porch.  It's no bigger than your hand.  It tirelessly roams out into your garden.  During raspberry season, it brings back one perfect raspberry at a time, depositing them in a little solid-state chiller in its docking station to await your collection at your convenience.  When it runs low on battery it sits on the charging station.  When it runs low on perfect berries, it senses ones with bugs or worms and snips them, taking them straight to your hot compost pile or your chicken run or other designated destination.  

This robot is not that device.  But we can -- if we hold our face just right and squint -- see that device in this robot.  And that device would indeed transform some of our permaculture dreams.  At scale -- imagine a fleet of 100 of these quadcopters, tending your food forest! -- that device would transform our whole food system.

Dan Boone wrote:If this unit has solved the hard problem (getting a machine to distinguish and successfully handle the ripe berry) there will soon be other units that do it better, faster, cheaper, and under more complicated circumstances.  Including -- this would be the permaculture dream -- in a polyculture.  Imagine a solar-powered quadcopter that docks on your porch.  It's no bigger than your hand.  It tirelessly roams out into your garden.  During raspberry season, it brings back one perfect raspberry at a time, depositing them in a little solid-state chiller in its docking station to await your collection at your convenience.  When it runs low on battery it sits on the charging station.  When it runs low on perfect berries, it senses ones with bugs or worms and snips them, taking them straight to your hot compost pile or your chicken run or other designated destination.  .

:) thank you yes, i really appreciate that sentiment. I'm just saying if there are any particular tech savvy permies out there, that strawberry farmer did it, there isn't any reason it can't be adapted to other/similar areas. i just saw such huge/alternative potential to this and thought i might spread some potential. anywho, thank you for your time

Ah, I see.  

It's a difficult balance.  Using machines that require finite resources to build and maintain doesn't seem very permanent to me.  If it was a machine that a person could maintain from local resources, that makes it closer to permaculture.

I think the question is how can we combine natural systems with the current economical restrictions like costly labour, having to harvest and transport long distances in a short period of time.  I suspect it would need some sort of hybrid system that looks like permaculture, but isn't permanently sustainable.  

Well, I admit I'm looking forward, with my tech utopianist glasses on.  (Normally I keep those specs safely stowed away for reasons that I can only discuss in Cider Press.) There are all sorts of trends I've seen in my lifetime, where stuff just keeps getting tinier, and lighter.  So even though fancy tech stuff currently requires all sorts of unsustainable resources (petroleum for plastic and rare earths for the batteries and and solar panels and so forth) the smaller bits don't need very much of them ... and the size trend keeps declining toward zero.  So many gadgets these days feel to me like a wad of intellectual property with barely enough matter in them to see and touch and interface with -- and the amount you need to see them and interface with them keeps going down.  

So, yeah, my vision of permaculture definitely includes lots and lots of that kind of tech.  When you're manipulating grams of matter instead of tons, you don't need very much energy to mine and refine and recycle it, you don't make as big a hole in the ground digging out the initial resources, it's a lot easier to do closed-loop "waste" streams that don't actually have any waste to speak of, and it's much more practical to do everything within the energy budget of annual insolation (which includes water, wind, solar, tides, animal, human, but not stored/fossil or nuclear).  One of the prices, though, is that most of these components are ultra miniaturized; this won't as a rule be home/cottage tech.  But I don't see how that necessarily makes it unsustainable or less permanent.  Once we get to the point where all the matter in the tech is 100 percent recycled (much easier to do on gram scales) or sourced from non-fossil sources (ditto) there's no reason obvious to me why a smart quadcopter has to be unsustainable just because I can't build it or maintain it on my kitchen table.  And if nobody was in a hurry, we could in theory run a global supply chain with sailing ships again, built out of sustainable timber and and fiber.