So many people are assuming there is true thought in OPEX, CAPEX, and employer rights and employer safety in these operations. As others mentioned, Thailand used Monkeys.
There is so much of a disconnect between this crowd and the farmers and the people this robot will actually replace.
What is the average annual income of a farm hand in Thailand, Philippines, or any country that has coconut farms with farm hands?
How about preventative maintenance?
Tariff, taxes and VAT (yeah they're all the same thing.)
"Additionally, while human coconut harvesters were found to work faster, Amaran could work for longer, potentially making up the difference."
It's controlled via a human, so, not really "work" longer, and then to scale up, how many robots do you really need vs available farm hands from the local province?
I don't see it succeeding or replacing farm hands for the reasons above.
I don't think you should interpret the article as saying they have solved automated coconut harvesting. This is a prototype which could eventually be integrated with other components to form a system which, at some point in the future, could replace manual labor.
Of course there are many situations where automation may never make sense. Then again, an automated solution may enable more growing scenarios to be profitable. It is good people are working on things that may not bear fruit for decades.
The ironic part is, literally, it will not bear fruit for decades.
"On fertile soil, a tall coconut palm tree can yield up to 75 fruits per year, but more often yields less than 30. Given proper care and growing conditions, coconut palms produce their first fruit in six to ten years, taking 15 to 20 years to reach peak production."
It still took cars about 40 years to displace most horses from the larger cities. But the sign was on the wall in 1897. Once such labor-saving technology exists, it tends to improve, slowly or faster, to the point that humans or horses cannot really compete anymore.
Good. I hope they lose these kinds of jobs to robots. Human beings shouldn’t be doing this kind of dirty and dangerous jobs.
Once upon a time they used slaves from Africa to pick cotton in the newly formed United States. I often wish I was around to see the mechanical cotton harvester for the first time ever. I KNOW it would have taken my breath away.
Consider this..there are 8 billion people in the world. Growing and doing manual labour for food, fodder, fuel and fiber is unimaginable and should be unimaginable...and we should strive to make all those jobs obsolete.
New jobs can be created. Once upon a time before automobiles there were workers who picked up horse poop and maintained stables. And one day, those jobs disappeared. And new jobs were created. We can’t stop progress. Imagine if the Luddites had won...
> There is so much of a disconnect between this crowd and the farmers and the people this robot will actually replace.
I look at it this way: these machines allow farms to replace workers from one, evidently shrinking pool of semi-skilled labor (farmhands who can and are willing to climb a coconut tree) with workers from a different pool (people who can be trained to operate a remote-controlled robot) that's growing.
This article and the comments here make it seem like coconut harvesters are mostly freelance farmhands, so I could imagine a scenario where you end up with, you know, Uber for coconut harvesting. There's no reason the farms need to really care about the costs associated with owning the machine, when other people can take on that responsibility and compete with one another to offer farmers the lowest cost per coconut.
So many people are assuming there is true thought in OPEX, CAPEX, and employer rights and employer safety in these operations. As others mentioned, Thailand used Monkeys.
There is so much of a disconnect between this crowd and the farmers and the people this robot will actually replace.
What is the average annual income of a farm hand in Thailand, Philippines, or any country that has coconut farms with farm hands?
How about preventative maintenance? Tariff, taxes and VAT (yeah they're all the same thing.)
"Additionally, while human coconut harvesters were found to work faster, Amaran could work for longer, potentially making up the difference."
It's controlled via a human, so, not really "work" longer, and then to scale up, how many robots do you really need vs available farm hands from the local province?
I don't see it succeeding or replacing farm hands for the reasons above.