Indian robot climbs trees to harvest coconuts
newatlas.com
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What's the problem with letting the coconuts fall off naturally? Danger?
Tender green coconuts will float because of the fibrous outer covering. Climbing the trees was dangerous and seemed scary. Coconut trees have no branches and it’s literally climbing all very rough tall pole barefoot. Amazing. I can understand why there’d be a shortage. The coconut climber was always in demand!
Even now, in 2020, this comes up frequently in product pricing when I talk to founders in India who haven't seen the Western notion of pricing first hand.
Pricing in the Western systems is all about finding out how high you can price so fewer people pay a lot more which offsets running a larger scale business to serve more customers at lower price points. So these systems have accepted that not everything is for everybody, and do not even make an effort to get things to people. US healthcare is a good example here.
Countries with much large populations can not run that way, not everything at least. We are still learning to balance, which is why I want to adopt a region-based pricing for anything I build. Since customers from Western nations get a kick by paying more, I say, let them. Get and money and subsidize for the rest.
"Finding out how high you can price" things is more of a strategy for veblen goods, it is certainly not how everything is priced nor exclusive to any geographic region... I don't think I'm following this at all. :)
Do you mean that there is some tradition based price and it's accepted as "unchanging", or something else?
If I perceive a “perceived” value, who perceives the “actual” value?
Spreadsheets?
As such, the actually valuable work with high danger, which should've been paid appropriately is significantly underpaid.
/edit: maybe its easier to relate in the context of the tech industry... while it has significantly less impact on the employees live its prevalent there as well, and in both directions.
fresh graduates which get less then a third of a full employee while still producing basically the same value to the employer. (this obviously depends on the graduate, but surely everyone knows that people at the start of their career tend to be significantly underpaid). both the graduate and the employer just don't perceive their work to be as valuable.
its just as easy to find the pendulum swinging in the other direction as well... people which might even effectively sabotage the work of others while still looking perfect to the person paying the bill, essentially increasing their perceived value to the person paying the bill while effectively reducing the actual throughput/quality.
If everyone knows this, then why isn’t there an employer taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity to pay the new graduates more and use their “valuable” labor to generate valuable products for sale?
The answer is that no one knows the exact numerical value of the “value” of someone’s labor. Hence we rely on the buyers and sellers’ making offers to each other and coming to an agreement. As long as there are many buyers and many sellers, working independently, the market value should become evident.
Sometimes the buyer pays a little extra, sometimes the seller pays a little extra. It’s when there is no price transparency and insufficient number of buyers and sellers that the signal gets noisy.
There's pressure on the consumer side not to pay, say, a tomato more than a few cents, which means you either pay workers peanuts or you just don't harvest them.
So, not that different I suppose.
Describing pricing according to demand as being the “Western notion of pricing” is one of the most bizarre things I’ve read on the internet recently. I say this as a resident of a South East Asian country where Chinese and Indian immigrant merchants have prospered plenty due to a keen sense of price and value.
Dumping food in landfills, milk in the fields or in the sea. Good groceries thrown into the garbage. It is optimised to maximise profits.
Even though the overall efficiency from farm to table is very good.
However, I don't think the skills were particularly in short supply especially back then (I am from Kerala, which translates to 'land of coconuts'). Ultimately the coconuts did get pulled although the workers weren't paid so well.
On the other hand, to say that caste system in India is an European thing, is the same as claiming that British introduced Hinduism in India. This is a very naive point of view IMAO.
how much would you pay for a coconut?
Caste works in a similar way, but is determined by birth.
You still see casteism and classism in Indian today, although it may be more subtle.
Somehow the poverty and destitution seems to be always blamed on the natives.
Moreover Caste system is a European system introduced by the British to divide up communities.
"The varnas originated in Vedic society (c. 1500–500 BCE). The first three groups, Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishya have parallels with other Indo-European societies, while the addition of the Shudras is probably a Brahmanical invention from northern India."
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India#Vedic_va...
Caste and any discrimination is abhorrent, and like others have commented is a more recent phenomenon. In old times and today, anyone can become a priest/Brahmin by learning. [2]
1. Same wikipedia page
2. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/amaravati/first-bat...
In Europe the king was the representative of god and got his powers through the church. Then came the merchants, landowners who funded the state. Artisans took the next rung. The unskilled workers took the most menial jobs came last.
We call this today as the class system but this was the original caste system imported from Europe and applied on the native population of India.
While one can not deny that there were/are different communities and a kind of class hierarchies in India just like in the rest of the world. The rigid caste system is actually the work of the Church. In India each community had its own gods and its own chieftains and priests.
https://www.quora.com/Which-caste-is-looting-India/answers/2...
Because at some point, it's not viable to harvest them. We're not talking about thousand acre farms. But if you have a few trees and a coconut ends up costing you xx whatever, then F it, let them fall when it's too late.
Today it is problem of economics.
Coconut trees typically grow in state of Kerala, a lot of the population there work in the Middle East oil economies , the pay is considerably better there. Paying competitively does not make enough money to be worth the effort.
Coconuts outside the big cities event today are dirt cheap you can get a dozen for something like $1.
Kerala is not easy place to be a immigrant, It is big semi urban region - think like American suburbs. There are hardly any cities where immigrants can get affordable housing, this is because lot of the money the state makes comes from remittances from middle east, they don't feel the need to migrate to the city for better jobs.
In recent times there has been some immigration into the state from North Eastern part of India especially in the food and construction sectors - housing is on-site or the restaurant is in the city.
Nah. Even in most rural places, coconuts are now priced at around 50 cents each.
The price flucatates and does drop below Rs 10 and even Rs 5 . Here the coconut board link [1] for wholesale prices.
I have personally traded with farms at Rs 5-6 range 3 years back in 2016.
[1] https://coconutboard.in/priceweb/Reports.aspx
Today I can see vendors quoting 10 per on some mundis.
Nor does the claim of 'caste system started in colonial era' make sense.
Aside: For people interested in learning more about what I am talking about, read up Nicholas Dirks, Balagangadhara or Jalki, Pathan.
In short, hierarchies existed between different groups in India, but these do not follow a 'ancient thousand year old varna system'. For instance, Majority of the kings(and dominant land owning jatis to this day) are not Kshatriyas,(nor Brahmins or Vaishya) who were initiated into thread ceremony. This includes famous Hindu kings like Vijayangara era Hakka/Bukka who came from shepherd jatis.
I can count in fingers how many from my village in south india from my grandfathers generation went to school or could read/write.
The reason congress first lost power in tamil nadu was partly because of caste based education proposed by rajagopalachari. Mid day meal program was pivotal in MGR's continued popularity . Education has always been key factor in politics since at least independence.
Sure there were exceptions and few kings could seize power with support from their powerful communities . They still remained illiterate though.
Education was only given to favoured few. Only few had access to God. A king could perhaps come from some random caste never the priest. he still comes from brahmins. Access to God and education was and still is weaponized to discriminate
The discrimination against women is the same, sure there were rare exceptions for women queens with power. never a single priest though.
He follows up the references in Dharampal in British Home Office records, which catalog the reports sent on native education by collectors to the governor Thomas Munro (including 'caste' statistics).
Tooley also read the work of Andrew Bell, on how mass education in Britain and later Europe was strongly influenced by what Rev Andrew Bell(who had come to Madras to manage a school) learnt about the methods of peer learning in native schools in Madras.
Dharampal's book is available online for free, and Arvind Neelakantan has a review of Tooley's book.
Some other disagreements, its not just 'few kings' but majority. The 'priest' claim is also not true. Majority of the mathas in say Karnatak and TN are run by non-brahmins, and there are plenty of pujaris from other jatis, not that that is a position of social privilege given how poorly paid they are and difficulty in getting married.
Being illiterate and unorganized, they don't have any negotiating power, which is the reason for lower pay. They also had no choice because they were told that they were "born" to do this work.
The reason for shortage of harvesters is that, the latest generation does not want to take up the family job because of poor pay and low status. The younger generation wants to get educated and move to big cities to find better jobs, thanks to the progressive reforms and loosening of the caste system in the recent decades, at-least in urban areas. The current generation of tree climbers will probably be the last or second last generation who does this job.
- There are a lot of alternatives to coconuts so if they become too expensive at market, people will buy other fruit, putting a ceiling on potential harvesting costs. If no one will do it at the price, better to just not pick them.
- There might not be an actual shortage, but since harvesting is a specialty craft that the whole business is beholden to, and too seasonal to hire in-house, the harvesters have lots of temporary power and scheduling optimization requirements between farms that makes it feel like there is a shortage. Kind'of like swimming pool builders in spring.
IIUC this was your role un maintaining the trees, and wasn't related to harvesting the coconuts? So it was for irrigation, I guess?
Incidentally my aunt's home is located right next to a snake shrine of old (yes, they give offerings to snakes, mostly cobras, there), even though the area is predominantly resided by Muslims. On the other hand, there is a Hindu temple in another district dedicated to the worship of a Robinhood-esque thief who was a Muslim - and the offerings are mostly alcohol (and previously weed).
Here, we follow a different method to cut the coconuts. The harvesters do not climb the tree. Instead, they tie together bamboo poles to form one long pole and tie a sickle to one end. The harvester then cuts the coconut bunch from the ground.
It is much more efficient and faster than climbing the trees. When I was young, I was fascinated by their craft. They are so good, that they could determine how ripen the coconuts were just by looking from the ground. Some times from very tall trees that are over 100 feet tall. And to balance a pole that large..
The tools they use are a loop made of fiber from palmyra leaf and a leather shield. The பனையேரி (literally means palmyra climber) wears the loop over their foot and the leather shield over their chest and they pull themselves up to the top of the tree. It's a brutally punishing and exhausting task.
I believe it might be an issue with this robot too. But you can see this requirement in the design of other tools. It always involves climbing the tree.
It reminds me of ABU Robocon, where undergraduates representing different countries compete to build the fastest robot using off-the-shelf parts that can solve an abstract problem. The point wasn't to fix a real-world issue but to serve as a learning tool, push technological boundaries and hopefully land a job while doing it.
Some cool videos from the last few years:
- 2019 Mongolia v/s Hong Kong https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WVDXrlHUsA
- 2018 Vietnam v/s China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kPI_51cLpo
- 2017 Vietnam v/s Malaysia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huzm9mrEZJE
> The contest aims to create friendship among young people with similar interests who will lead their countries in the 21st century, as well as help advance engineering and broadcasting technologies in the region.
That's pretty wholesome.
Since then I've been thinking: why is it so difficult to harvest coconuts? Surely a pair of long clipper or some sort of stick-like device ought to do it? I've popped a few coconuts myself of trees, it's not that complicated, right?
> Coconut trees that are harvested for milk tend to be taller than 15m, so monkeys are often used instead. [1]
So 15 meters is a lot of stick though, is it really not doable? Ladder and a stick? Surely there's a simple way to reach it?
The only answer I manage to find is that coconut farmers generally can't afford _any expensive devices_ thats why they use monkeys or climb the trees or rig up these cheap dangerous devices. So reading the news about a bloody robot, the most expensive and complicated solution that can be applied to this scenario, just makes me laugh really.
1 - https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1948652/slave-m...
Well, I read the article. Why exactly is this supposed to be a problem? By all accounts, it's a good idea that works well.
I know I'm excaggerating. But it annoys me to no end that we came to think this is 'a happy life' in any remote sense. An ox, to me, is on the furthest part of the spectrum of forced labor.
I found Harari's Book 'Sapien' very enlightening on the parts about the history of human abuse to animals. Oxen get a honorary mention.
Which, I imagine, is or was quite often the case. I'm no historian nor a farming-expert, so I'm really just guessing.
Those are very strong implications you are making. What makes you think an ox that pulls a tiller is _happy_?
Generally enslaving an animal to do something is considered unethical. How we much of "unethical" we accept as a society is a completely different matter though.
This is about as far from the truth as it's possible to be.
As the other commenter said, why would you assume I even have an opinion on Indian bulls, let alone supporting their labor?
Free human adults may be the victim of a circumstance that has them shambling up coconut trees, but they have an end to end understanding of why they're doing it, and they still have a domain of choice that's always broader than that of any animal and the enslaved.
I don't think too many people who are against animal labor are for human slavery. Free humans who get to tacitly choose which crappy job to do in their squalor still much more power than the enslaved. We can even reach self-actualization as long as we are given the illusion of free choice among bad options. Rescuing lower sentience from slavery comes before rescuing free humans from crappy choices, imo.
The biggest problem is that 15 minutes to mount the robot (and a similar time to disassemble it again, probably), is probably more time that an experienced harvested would need to climb and take the fruit down.
This seems a very bold claim. I can believe that there is a shortage of people willing to do this job, but it is very hard to believe that the reason is the tech jobs.
Even in the USA IT workers represent less than 5% of all jobs.
Otherwise interesting how automation is increasing around the world.
This news report, dated August elaborates: https://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Madurai/future-looks-bl...
Worth noting that the university in question is situated in the same province, Tamil Nadu. Section 144 has been imposed, which is a law that prohibits gatherings/assembly and gives the police sweeping powers to arrest/detain curfew breakers.
Remember California in 2011? How many unicorns in SV post 2010?
This applies to other professions as well: education naturally makes families aware that they don’t need to continue in menial professions in villages so they send their kids to towns or cities.
In the case of India with a rising middle class for every family there are three other families providing services to them. No matter how shitty that work might be it's probably easier than harvesting coconuts.
I remember things my Mexican friend said about his family. In the 50's their grandfathers were seasonal farm workers in California. And then full time farm workers. The next two generations left farm work for things like working autobody shops, painting cars, making high end furniture. My friend and his brothers run and electronic assembly business. So moving up.
1. Lots of people in rural places migrate to urban and semi urban places and make a living off of providing some sort of service to people in tech jobs.
2. A large section of young population in rural areas come to cities and start businesses, very small scale, such as eateries, curry points, trades, cab drivers, etc.
3. A good chunk of people go into the maintenance and services sector, such as building maintenance, sweepers, contractor jobs, etc.
4. A good chunk are employed in the large and ever expanding construction works in almost every nook and corner of India.
So each IT tech job, indirectly employs a bunch of other jobs, most of which are done by younger people.
So tech jobs do put a huge dent on the availability of labor services.
As an example, I am an engineer in a highly respected company, earning on par with an IT guy. But in the last decade, labor cost (daily wages for unskilled labor, usually in the construction business) has gone up to be about 1/4th of what I earn in one day. And that is a significant increase. It used to be about 1/10 of what I earned.
Why not built a mechanical crane with a platform to help the worker to do better job with safety at heights to harvest a coconut and than apply the same for multiple tasks like repairing street lights. Cleaning the building facades and homes, cleaning and arranging work at heights. I believe existing technology can do it.
Usually multi-purpose robots cost way higher and requires more maintenance and costs. Given the average labour costs in India with over 10% unemployment in urban areas and much higher in rural areas created by economic mismanagement for second term by the current government. I believe human labour is more versatile and cheaper, if supported by right amount of technology in India. It’s crucial for its development.
Humans can always invent new forms of labor. Limited only by imagination and opportunity. We should be automating everything we can while actively creating new categories of employment for every person
Maybe a flying drone cutter might work too.
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.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
In my country, the first horseless carriage (car) was produced in 1897.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pr%C3%A4sident
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.
The trees are over 25 years, it's taller than a two storey building[1], it's getting harder to find someone who can bring down the coconuts as the article states and also to maintain the trees(debris). Many of our neighbours have removed their trees for the same reasons and we have started to contemplate it as well, but it's hard to think about as these trees are like our family members.
So, naturally I've thought of mechanical devices which could solve this problem, there have been numerous attempts to solve this problem by various institutions and independent inventors incl. use of robotics like in OP; but those without human intervention hasn't made it mainstream and only those devices which help a climber climb fast/safe has seen some success.
https://www.finna.fi/Cover/Show?id=lusto.M011-138214&index=1...
I wonder if something like those would also work for climbing coconut trees?
Here is another one that Youtube suggested:
I feel like specialist equipment is going to cost to much IRL.
Drones will continue to advance and have more people who can work with them.
Not saying drones would be cost effective either, but I think at least you can pivot.
Also see Sreamers - https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/
This is why you'd do a drone. It's a good learning experience directly to industry.
A tree climbing robot is way more abstract. Which might be good depending on the degree. But you'll never work on tree climbing robots in real life.
Neither will ever be used by farmers to pick coconuts, so it depends on what you want.
But drone solutions seem much more efficient, especially given how long it takes to set up the robot featured here (15 mins per tree). This time would undoubtedly be reduced in production units, but variability in trunks will always complicate things. With a drone, it doesn't matter.
I think you could get the setup down to 30 seconds with parts that clip tightly together, e.g. how folding bikes work. The controls seem like a bigger problem, as automating that for the wide variety of natural trees, conditions, and lighting seems challenging. Having it crawl to the next tree and wrap itself around it to climb would be pretty neat too.
From product development point of view, I think a team of 3-5 smart and experienced people is likely to deliver better result in a couple of months, given reasonable amount of funding to purchase commercially available components.
To harvest berries or olives or apples, something in the vicinity of "put a tarp down and shake the tree really hard" is usually a fairly reliable method. Coconuts don't quite work that way, as anyone who grew up in a place with coconut palms and tropical storms can attest.
Not to mention that they're often 30 feet or more off the ground...
Not to discount your point. Coconuts don't work like any of these.
Coconuts are the opposite, and I think it's a more difficult problem than it appears to be.
1. Full disclosure, I'm not a farmer or an engineer, just a guy who has spent some time studying agricultural automation.
In terms of economy, the southern part is well off, there are few pockets of poverty. But poverty isn't as visible as rest of India https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/southern-comfort-indi...
Coming to the robot/contraption. Growing up in an environment with an average-sized coconut farm. The device is completely useless. The assembly time per tree, even if its 5 minutes, would take 5*200 trees -> 16 hours in just assembly. And this amount of trees get covered in almost 2 days of 6-hour labor in a season by manual labor. Also, coconut harvesting isn't just about plucking the coconuts, but also involves cleaning the top. Picking the right coconut to be plucked etc. In that aspect, the robot would do more harm to the farmer. Though the cost of labor is high, a serious farmer is going to convert a portion of his yield into oil, which gives a decent margin. Also, this won't be the only crop they depend on. My family had a rubber plantation along.
Labour shortage is a real issue and it isn't economically profitable for someone with about 20 trees or so. But this device under the current design solves only one problem, i.e plucking and solves it very badly.
https://investigations.peta.org/monkeys-abused-coconut-milk/
According to https://www.wfft.org/wildlife-general/a-growing-trade-monkey... monkeys cost between $1000-$4000/head
Also do note that monkey based coconut picking is on the decline: https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-08-26/does-thailand-have-mo... Only a small proportion of coconuts are actually picked by monkeys.
Another cost farmers will likely look at is the cost of a monkey handler, which are widespread vs the cost of a specialised employee who can operate a robot. Unfortunately, the monkey handler is likely cheaper.
This isn't intended as a 'gotcha', everyone has a line. Given that you're willing to quote PETA without spitting on the ground, I'd infer that you are far into the animal rights, militant vegan camp? Is that fair?