This is an improvement within the current paradigm of "big ag", but IMHO tech is opening the possibility of a completely different way of doing things. For example, this comment which is below the linked video imagines a robot-maintained food forest, I think it's on point because I, too, believe that the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors:
> Imagine, a few years down the line, applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm. Not necessarily a big machine going through a flat field, but small drones tending to trees, vines, herbs, plants, pollinators and water features all in the location that is best for them based on local features. It could micromanage weeding and harvesting, but also composting, planting, grafting and nurturing keystone species and rare species while avoiding pesticide, nitrogen imbalance and soil compaction. A productive farm could look like the garden of Eden.
A key problem with small autonomous robots is their energy supply and mass. Batteries have low energy density. Actuators have bad power to weight ratios too. Living things are enormously more efficient. So much so that the intuition apparently offered by watching animals usually does not apply.
This is extremely true for swarm robotics, inspired by ants, termites, etc. Swarm critters rely on the emergent effects of lots of behavior to make up for their limited sensing and computation. By 'limited' I mean relative to a mammal or bird. Lots of behavior means lots of energy spent moving and doing: exactly what is prohibitively expensive for a robot.
Computation and sensing is getting better, smaller and cheaper much faster than batteries and actuators. This trend favors smarter robots that think carefully (cheap) and do the right thing (expensive per shot).
We dream of lots of fun things. And even try some of them. But not a few days go by that we don’t once again mutter “power is king” To each other. Everything we do revolves around the constraint of power budgets.
Make a square of tensioned cable (or rigid rail) boxing in some area of garden/food forest/farmland at a height above the plants. Have 4 modules which maintain position on opposite sides and holds a tensioned wire between them, making a tensioned wire along the x and a tensioned wire along the y. At the intersection of these wires there is a powered doohicky that can act like a spider and drop down onto the plants below and do its work. The power to the doohicky could be cable from either axis.
It feels like this approach would constrain you from planting in an organic/spontaneous manner; you'd have to plant stuff to make sure it lines up with the cables above right?
Following the other comment re: power being king, what if we used a hub-and-spoke model where small drones with cameras (for sensing) and simple arms w/ clampers (for manipulating) perform 'bursts' of energy intensive activity and aggregate their sensory inputs into one composite report on the health of the plants? They do their thing (maybe for 10 - 15 mins or however long their battery lasts) and then fly back to the hub to charge. The hub itself could rely on a hybrid combo of guaranteed external power and solar panels.
Ofc, it'd be cool to see a cost analysis of how expensive this solution is (from both technical and financial standpoints) versus simpler, more energy-efficient human inputs (aka walk around your garden and prune trees that need it and pick berries that are ripe).
How about having an induction recharge state every few meters? They could be rolled out as the same type of infrastructure as water piping is now. At scale, induction chargers can be manufactured very inexpensively.
Plus maintenance on large number of things is a b*tch.
My better half owns a small hotel with 19 rooms. Turns out running a simple 10 minutes task in each room takes... entire day (3 hours for the work + switch room overhead + breaks turns out to be full day often).
The problem is that swarms of robots can be used for destructive purposes. There, the amount of energy expended and the loss of some drones is no match for the destruction caused. Not to mention all those decentralized self healing swarms are totally resistant to the conventional “destroy the Borg queen” nonsense trope of so many alien movies. (Yes I specifically mentioned the Borg queen because it was the moment Trek nerfed the Borg’s greatest strength and became like all the other denoument alien action flick franchises)
>The problem is that swarms of robots can be used for destructive purposes.
Well, toxic chemical agents can also be used as weapon on human civil, and — sadly — it was actually used that way. Plus even when you use them for farming, you still have pollution that will erode biodiversity, human health, and other sustainable environment negative impacts.
Not to say that robot swarm is necessarily a perfect green solution. You still have to build them and feed them with energy, so even if the robot would be exempt of undesirable side effect on local operational site, the global impact would most likely include plants in their lifecycle.
Not to mention by making it pulled by tractor you get something that complements the existing o̶l̶i̶g̶o̶p̶o̶l̶i̶s̶t̶s̶ large players so it's more like you can do something with them to scale yourself out rather than compete against them to scale yourself out. It's much smarter making something tractor pulled from a business economics perspective, not just from a physics perspective.
what if we make them bigger than insects but still relatively small? just an arm on a track. heck, we can put the energy in the track too. boom, no battery.
There are some interesting things being done with pivot spans. Hummingbird runs nozzles back and forth on rails suspended from each pivot span. But they’re difficult to keep running.
Ag is hard. It’s dusty. The weather can be brutal. Stuff gets left out year round. The turnover is high. Schedules are dynamic and unforgiving (when the weather turns, you have to adapt your whole operation). There’s not a lot of highly technical staff to maintain things; bailing wire and bandaids is a real thing. The tradition of “hacking things” to keep them working comes from farmers.
The more complicated your machinery, the more your MTBF product goes up. So complicated units don’t scale well.
If a single sprinkler on a pivot fails or misbehaves, there’s nearly 400 of them and there’s some overlap. If your “robot” stalls out with some grit or a power supply issue or a bricked update, or leaky hydraulics, you just lost 1/10 of your pivot. Pray it happens on an inner span, rather than an outer one.
Gigantic arms are not feasible because of how torque and leverage work.
As your arm gets longer, it has to get stronger, thus heavier, thus requiring larger motors, and anchored to the ground better. After a handful of meters, robot arms can’t hold themselves up, let alone carry a useful tool.
There are multiple meter long robot arms for lifting big things in factories but they are enormous, enormously expensive, and consume enormous power.
But here’s a delightful concept that sidesteps this, by making the arm weigh nothing:
This could simultaneously absolve the need for autonomous vehicles, because whenever you need to go somewhere, you could just make the giant arm put you there.
That's called a train. It's great. You can read a book while you are transported, it uses very little power to get you there, it can be 0 emission, there are no traffic jams. Sadly it's not fashionable cause you can't show off how wealthy you are by using it.
Why not both? You could have each train actually be an array of arms that reach out and pick people up and move them along their route. The arms wouldn't have to be as long since the train is moving along the rail, and a select number of arms could be reserved for first class passengers.
In the US, most tracks prioritize freight traffic over passenger rail. And there is a tremendous amount of freight traffic. There may not often be traffic jams, but when you are diverted to side track to wait and allow a priority freight train through, it's not uncommon to wait a very long time (I've been delayed more than an hour on the 3 hour train ride from Portland to Seattle).
There are also huge bottlenecks in US track infrastructure that absolutely do lead to traffic jams - perhaps most infamously in New York City. Vetoing the addition of 6 additional tracks through NYC is one of the reason Chris Christie was so hated.
It's faster than flights on short (<3 hour) routes because you don't have the whole security theatre thing. Also train stations are in the city center usually and airports are in the outskirts.
Watching that video made me joyful. I was an agronomist in the early nineties walking soybean fields twelve hours a day mapping weeds and then going back to the office making what's called postemerge chemical recommendations to get most of the weeds that I had observed.
During those hot days having then written software for a hobby I thought there has to be a better way. Could a sprayer map weeds and apply chemicals in a single pass? I did an in depth investigation talking to tech people and university experts to see if what I imagined was possible. What I found out was that we were decades away from the tech making it possible.
A couple of years later Monsanto came out with Roundup resistant soybeans and my soybean field walking was greatly reduced overnight. Problem with this one solution fits all was that soybean yields dipped with the resistant beans for farmers that previously had good weed control and we began to develop more Roundup resistant weeds.
I did notice that this company is working with high value crops only. I believe the reason is the tech currently is quite expensive. Though in time the cost should come down as more farmers use it.
One problem for the Eastern states is the use of shields on the boom. The company that I worked for experimented with shields on our commercial sprayers. In fact we were the first people to do it East of the Rocky Mountains. We bought them because we wanted to be able to spray on windy days. The shields had problems and were parked in the weeds in a single crop season.
The best parts of that job was when you stood still for a minute late in the season, completely oblivious to the stream of fire ants pouring into your boots
I did a lot of soil testing. Refused to go out on November 15th, the start of deer season, after the 4WD pickup I was using was shot up in a field. I hugged the floorboard as shots went through the truck and just over me. How a bright yellow pickup could be confused with a deer is beyond me.
>How a bright yellow pickup could be confused with a deer is beyond me.
It wasn't. It was confused with a government vehicle. The one day a year that is synonymous with hunting accidents just provided plausible deniability for taking a few pot shots.
That would be a good time to use those extra-loud non-stop alarm in your car.
Every single people working in their property should have one working non-stop in the deer season to signal that is not a deer. Some just are deertonic and unable to distinguish it from cars.
Also, the key difference between a 'hard' challenge like self-driving cars and something like self-sustaining agriculture is that the reliability doesn't need to be 100%. An achievable target could be something like 'one human to operate the location'. Things will break, software will glitch, maintenance will be required - but that will be OK, as long as the issues can be corrected in a reasonable length of time.
Furthermore, with the right sensors, there's an opportunity for the swarm to self-correct without human intervention based on results. It doesn't have to be exactly right at the moment, because any ill effects will be noticeable and fixable well after a mistake is made.
It doesn't even need to use herbicides because it removes weeds mechanically. We actually build it to also fit into Europe's small(er) scale farms as well.
Regarding the energy issues mentioned multiple times in various threads here: We managed to make it solar powered and battery buffered to work autonomously for more than a working day.
> applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm
Yup, actually if you read between the edits toward the end of the video I think this is in the minds of those working on it, not sure why it wasn't focused on more, perhaps because it sounds less immediately practical... once the automation is somewhat intelligent, the need for a monoculture for viable large scale agriculture is diminished.
In fact at a certain point of sophistication, especially when harvesting a polyculture becomes viable, it will probably flip and become significantly more profitable long term to abandon monoculture... since the soil health will improve over time which also improves yields.
Reading the comments in this thread reminded me of "Silent Running" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Running). Droids (albeit 70s-style), agro-tech, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi. It's dated but enjoyable.
I feel like what you're describing is still in the realm of sci fi because of limitations in robot autonomy that we have expected to break through many times without success. If we succeed with autonomous driving we will probably succeed in these domains as well. As well as many other domains.
'We' have already succeeded in autonomous driving in agricultural and mining domains - these are much simpler, more tightly controlled and less liability prone than open highways and suburban backstreets.
eg:
> We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and directions of all vehicles at all times.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
Ehhh really haven't. While you could argue farming is different due to it being more constricted, it really isn't and well unlike driving, this has a size constraint which has and likely will not be solved for in the near or distant future. It's complicated and might not be solvable. And well the current advancements while they seem nice aren't very useful. I know individuals who work in this sphere specifically and there are several problems alone with basic things such as sensors which are not adequate enough, if anyone attempts to solve this problem in the next decade I'd believe them to be the next theranos.
> And well the current advancements while they seem nice aren't very useful.
Current advancements already allow tractors to go autonomously go over the bulk of the same large areas of ground that they have for the past decade (already logged and recorded), graceful fallback alerts remote farmer to make a human decision re: tree falls, new rocks, unexpected gear state changes.
These are useful advancements in machine control.
These developments have locally run in parallel with the above linked Rio Tinto work here in W.Australia - it's a pity the largest mining operation on the globe has imagined its work to be productive and useful and allowed its cost analysis to sway its thinking lacking your insight to the contrary.
Working for John Deere I can tell you that we are attempting to solve the problems right now. I can't speak for the company, but that we are working on it is public knowledge.
My educated guess is detecting humans/children in places where they shouldn't be. Sending a tractor across a field controlling everything is easy - tractors have been doing this for more than 25 years. Detecting something that shouldn't be there and not killing it is hard, which is why all tractors that do this have some form of sensor to ensure someone is in the tractor. There are a few other issues similar to the above.
I work for John Deere, I can't speak for the company.
This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice anything, especially compared with 100% lower capacity.
I think the worry is that with 1,000 drones, if you have 10 breaking daily, that's probably a full-time job for someone to be repairing them, especially if they have to go out retrieving them.
One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
I guess I don't really understand your assumptions. Why would 1 massive machine capable of doing all the various tasks of managing this farm require less maintenance than 1000 presumably much simpler, smaller machines? Assuming other things besides mobility break, I don't think retrieval would be much more of an issue, or that we'd have reason to expect the failure rate to be higher for each smaller, simpler drone than for the giant, super-complex one. To get the same work done, the behemoth would have to move much faster, have many more specialize tools and sensors all in the same rig, and would not be swappable for regular maintenance without pausing the entire workflow. Small drones could go back to base in shifts (again with some margin of extra drones) so that there are always 1000 actively working.
To be clear: we were talking about a "food forest," not the kind of row-based farm tractor in the video. I certainly agree that the kind of tractor in the video is simpler than the swarm units would be. But a giant tractor that can navigate a forest is a different matter entirely, no?
On large scales, it's more like you have a hundred big tractors and if one of them breaks down the whole operation keeps going because there are 99 big tractors left. The question then becomes: how much maintenance do you have to do per ton of food produced? A swarm of small robots have a lot more parts than a large tractor that does the same amount of work.
There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is being done.
I guess it's true that the originally propose 1000 is an arbitrary number, and it would take some experimentation and work to figure out the ideal number of robots per acre to optimize whatever you care about most (yield, power consumption, maintenance costs being obvious contenders). But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of some size.
> But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of some size.
Yeah, nobody suggested that we have building size tractors so I don't know what you're arguing.
They were talking about "current farming machine sized ones" vs "a drone with some crap attached"
and there is the problem of having too much variety on crops and people wanting meat, basically…
farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far away… because some already give reports of what went wrong to the central
Big tractor isn't more complex than smaller machines. It's just bigger. So you're essentially having 1000x the failure rate.
Big farm will also have more than one machine and the "downtime" will be mostly scheduled maintenance, very little chance of your equipment just deciding to not work today. In case of many smaller farms, well, you can ask the neighbour... from what I remember from living in small village with many farmers "harvest" was often few farms pooling their resources and doing all the fields together, instead of each doing their own.
The one big battery is easier and faster - in large part because you can't lift that yourself so you have machines to do the work for you. For AAA you could design the same machine, but odds are you didn't.
If I had to replace 10k batteries, I'd probably make (or buy) a machine for that too. However, even replacing 10k batteries by hand probably costs less in employee hours than a single one-off machine for either example.
(40 hours / 10,000 batteries = 14.4 seconds per battery; USA minimum wage = $7.25/h = $290 per 40h week, about the same as the cheapest hydraulic lift I saw on machinemart.co.uk at current exchange rates, but I'm not a mechanic so I don't know if that would be the right tool for the job anyway).
And of course, the same applies if we really had drone swarms — anything like this would be automated, up to and including full disassembly of damaged units so their parts could be reused for new units, e.g. https://youtu.be/pDZdnbI0MAc
Taking real life analogy of probably similar complexity scenario. Would you prefer to maintain 1 very big photo copier. Or 100 distributed desktop printers...
Did you know that natural swarm dynamics completely baffled us up until a few years ago: How do birds communicate well enough to stay on a group? How do they know which direcion to go? How does it look like a singular consciousness is undulating through hundreds or thousands of individuals? We marvelled and were dumbfounded.
But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following.
Honestly, I think robot swarms will be simpler than large singles.
All the complexity in farming is in getting the view on the small fraction of the area and applying treatment (water, fertilizer, removing weeds etc) into that area.
The "swarm" is meaningless there. Each node need to have minimum amount of sensing and computation to handle that job.
It's also at worst "a sloped square" so there is no "swarm mechanic" to move around, just zigzag around the field.
> But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following.
I hope you don't mean "Boids" and the three-four simple rules, because that's just an approximation of a swarm behavior made for artistic purposes - i.e. the result is supposed to pass as a flock of birds or a school of fish to casual onlookers (e.g. gamers, audience of a movie), and not to be accurate to the real thing.
Even if it were "Boids", I don't think it worsens the argument by a lot.
The essence of the statement is that complex behavior can emerge from a simple ruleset.
I'd like to add, that while individual behavior is difficult to predict, a general motion prediction can be much easier. (Think shepherds, for example)
Yes, the current ways of doing intensive farming are hard on the land and ultimately very wasteful. If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming, what they have in common is that they leverage a more data driven approach where you simply don't need to pre-emptively correct problems if you can manage the environment in which you grow plants better. Avoiding the conditions that cause pests and weeds to get out control is much more efficient than dealing with them after things get out of control.
Basically, intensive agriculture is compensating for its destructive nature by just brutally suppressing any "undesirable" growth. In nature, pests target the weaker plants. Basically, you stress out plants by mismanaging them and they are fair game for a wide range of fungi, insects, etc. E.g. under or over watering them, depleting the soil, etc. all stress plants out. If you have unhealthy soil, it's hard to have healthy plants growing in it.
Intensive agriculture starts with disrupting the soil (by plowing it). This causes the soil to degrade over time and releases captured carbon into the atmosphere. The natural response is for aggressive weeds to start growing in disrupted soil. To "fix" this, farmers use a mix of pesticides and fertilizers. The pesticides kill a lot more than just the pests and weeds and then further degrades the soil and the bio diversity in and on it. And finally the fertilizer is just bleeding out of the land straight into the ground water and surrounding areas. It works but it is resource intensive. You need lots of water, chemicals, energy, etc to grow a single crop at the cost of literally anything else. Basically modern intensive farming grows mono cultures on top of artificially created deserts.
Organic farming avoids doing that. Try not to disrupt the soil. Kill off (and compost) weaker plants rather than trying to rescue them. Use nature to keep pests and weeds in check. Etc. It works but it is more labor intensive. You need people to look after things. You get healthier and tastier produce (cooks love organically grown stuff for this reason). However, automating that labor makes it more scalable. That's the opportunity here.
> If you look at the progress in pesticide free organic farming and indoor/vertical farming
By what measure is vertical farming more efficient?.
I've heard the contrary regarding green house gas emissions, it is still less efficient in most crops, it consumes too much power and that overcompensates any efficiency gained in other areas
It's interesting that this conclusion can change drastically if electricity becomes 10-100x more efficient
I don't know what you've heard and where you've heard it but there is generally a lot of misinformation floating around and most of it is being sponsored by lobbies with an agenda to keep the oil and gas companies going. So, I would suggest not taking any of that at face value. Including what you hear in threads like this or from me.
Vertical farms are essentially closed systems where nutrients, energy and some water goes in and produce comes out. There's a bit more to it of course but that's the general idea. They are climate controlled environments where light is provided via grow lights. In short, it uses energy which needs to come from somewhere.
You are confusing power requirements and greenhouse gases. Mostly these things use some form of sustainable power. Either sourced indirectly via some electricity provider; or directly with e.g. solar panels. If you think about it, the number one expensive consumable here is electricity and the cheapest way to produce it is via renewables. It's that simple. Why would you get more expensive energy if you can get it cheaper. Keeping all those ACs, lights, pumps, etc. going you are going to have to figure that one out or deal with competition that is smarter than you on that front.
There are probably a few farms that are forced to buy via the grid and are hopelessly dependent on their local coal burning monopolists. Not a great business plan but the good news is that coal is rapidly becoming a very unfashionable way to produce power due to the fact that it is expensive and dirty. It being expensive cuts down on energy margins and causes coal dependent producers to be dealing with awkward things like going bankrupt and being forced to pay more for their coal than they can charge for the resulting energy when wind is blowing and the sun is shining. Gas has similar issues, as people that pay gas bills these days can vouch for. Mine went up by 2x recently. Not great.
> They are climate controlled environments where light is provided via grow lights
Solar's efficiency is below 50% [https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html]. Considering that, I'd guess for each m² of solar panel deployed, you'll get <50% of the yield that would be produced in that same land with horizontal farming (assuming fertile land).
You can argue that solar panels can be deployed in non-agricultural surfaces, and that's true, that allows to grow things where it was not possible before. But I'm not convinced that vertical farming is more efficient than horizontal on very important metrics like cost and GHG emissions
I love this vision and hope it becomes the dominant telos for all of the work underway in this area. In addition to "beautiful farm," imagine a world where farms, parks, wildlife preserves, decarbonization centers, and biological research hubs are all the same place? No reason these swarms can't be optimizing/managing a native ecosystem food-forest with high yield in mind... and likewise easy to imagine unobtrusive, silent robots that don't stand in the way of the ecosystem's normal functioning.
I keep saying I want a laser on a turret that zaps cabbage moths, snails, japanese beetles, squash bugs. Do I need it? No... but it would reduce my labor and losses while increasing profit.
There's so much opportunity for improvement, but we need the R&D money and start-ups to be there too. Please, VCs, spend your money on these projects!
This sprayer is designed to promote the growth of {everything it doesn't kill}. Those 'weeds' will have as much benefit from the spot-spraying as the crop. Which is either significant, or it's negligible (and this sprayer is useless, so probably not that)
> the future is swarms of small robots rather than a few big tractors:
You are missing something important: soil compaction is a sub linear function of weight. which means that larger tractors that cover more area with the same tire tracks are must friendly for the soil, compared to many small tractors. Because of this factor larger is better. Eventually we may get to the point where the tractor runs on tracks, to allow even bigger tractors that touch a smaller are of soil.
Sure flying drones will have less soil compaction, and they will have a place in the future, but keeping something in the air uses vastly more energy than wheels on the ground.
Oh lovely. OSE is still doing good. I remember reading up on the project a decade or so ago back when it was basically just a wiki and a handful of engineers.
The project is pretty well thought out and extremely ambitious. I can only hope they continue to make good progress on it.
If only there were swarms of self replicating autonomous systems that can heal, recharge and defend themselves without input and adapt to new situations, while being stress tested for free for millions of years.
But I'm dreaming, certainly if it would have existed humans would have tried to leverage them a long time ago.
Snark aside, as useful as the birds and the bees are, they've got their own goals, and those goals aren't always aligned with ours — hence the use of pesticides and insecticides, or indeed scarecrows, in the first place.
We had such a system. It was called slavery. Lots of cheap labor. And still we arranged our crops in the style of vineyards, so as to reduce to travel time of workers between plants.
I feel this dream of robots everywhere gets us farther from a garden of Eden.
To cultivate the earth we're going to mine other parts of it? I'm not suggesting getting rid of the tools that improve quality of life but does automating one aspect not cause 100 other things down the line? There's mining, factories, repairing, replacing.
Maybe instead of robots we work on getting people to have gardens on their property, in cities use the rooftops, stop importing foods from across the globe, etc.
> Imagine, a few years down the line, applying these principles to maintaining an edible polyculture ecosystem-farm. Not necessarily a big machine going through a flat field, but small drones tending to trees, vines, herbs, plants, pollinators and water features all in the location that is best for them based on local features. It could micromanage weeding and harvesting, but also composting, planting, grafting and nurturing keystone species and rare species while avoiding pesticide, nitrogen imbalance and soil compaction. A productive farm could look like the garden of Eden.