Reading the comments it struck me: why is tele operated agricultural robots not a thing? A robot with wheels and an array of cameras and arms. It rolls down the line and remote workers pick the fruit. Maybe even out of country workers being paid pennies...I’m sure the latency could be overcome. You could host thousands of humans with very few robots. Better productivity, lower cost in the long run and you’re resilient against labor problems which is really good when all your labor is illegal. If nobody gives a good reason why it doesn’t exist I would be receptive to people who might want to do a start up...

Googling around I find some recent stuff. It seems to have started being on people’s minds in the past five years only. A lot of complicated articulated arms and inputs. I am only more convinced that there is arbitrage here... a very simple articulation mechanism, something akin to what hello robot did vs willow garage, would be totally new. And you don’t have to replicate perfectly the performance of humans because it’s a sliding scale, you could use the robot to downsize at first, following it with a small human team.