RoboCrop: Teaching robots how to pick tomatoes
phys.org
phys.org
At what point do we begin to grow tomatoes specifically for their harvestability (in addition / as opposed to other attributes)?
This sort of thing happened years ago with farmers producing product specifically for things like "durability in shipping" -- I'm thinking of "machine-pickable" as the natural next step for growers to aim for.
Is this already being done? I'd love to hear about how this sort of thing is already in place.
Whether this means mechanically manipulating flower + fruit locations (specifically growing vines in a way that produces fruit in a controlled manner), or possibly even breeding cultivars that specifically have more robot-friendly fruit clustering, I wonder what these sorts of efforts might look like in the future?
> Is this already being done?
This is, indeed, already something that is done. As I understand it, for tomatoes it's typically for canning varieties, but they're called determinate cultivars[1]. Even with those, I know in processing you still have to discard the occasional fruit that isn't ripe.
I imagine this kind of technological solution would also be more useful when picking tomatoes for use as the fresh fruit.
See below for a couple examples:
https://www.denso.com/global/en/news/newsroom/2024/20240513-...
[1] https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(25)00840-2
There is plenty of fruits (Pawpaw, loquat, soursop come to mind) that are really not grown at-scale commercially in the US due to spoilage, easy to bruise, or other similar issues.
If you like interesting fruit, I highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/@WeirdExplorer/
for many fruits you will have never seen before.
If you wait till they are about to spoil on the vine, even the one's you really don't like will have taste
Now, the supermarkets that sold those have solved it by breeding ones that are incredibly sweet.
This has been happening for hundreds of years already with every food crop.
Edited to add the in practice part.
Things like growing crops in rows. Things like grape vines being trained into rows. Things like nut trees bred so they shed their nuts when shaken by a mechanical shaker.
These things are the same, it's just how automated we go.
I've spent over a decade in the agtech/robotics space here in Norcal and everyone seems to have an opinion, until you actually go out to where our food is grown and find out it's already highly automated, robotic, etc. It's just not sexy in the VC tech way we need it to be to be cool to talk about.
Go to a modern farm, see how intertwined tech, farming, biology, all is. It didn't get this way overnight.
Put another way. What improvements to plants to benefit human harvestability can you think of wouldn't also improve robotic harvestability?
I could be totally wrong about this, but the first thing that occurs to me would be something like inconsistent polyploidalism in something like strawberries. It makes larger fruits that are easier to spot and visually recognize, easier to grasp for human hands, but their inconsistent sizes and shapes could mean that they are less able to be "machineable".
It seems like growing strawberries that are more likely to be of consistent size / shape would be better for machineability -- even if it means the average fruit size is smaller.
Kindof like when my son raised chickens for 4H -- he wasn't graded on the size of his largest chickens, but rather whether or not he could grow a flock of chickens that were all consistent in size / weight.
Consistency over yield.
Harvesting would be fine for me to do by hand, because that is indeed he really hard part, especially with mixed crops.
Harder parts are the watering, because that's the part which is always broken. Dutch company.
And detecting diseases. Which is the harder AI part my company is doing.
Moving the heavy robot around is also not that easy, esp. with the cheap dutch robots.
Do they? Academia is about the individual. It is not about others. Sometimes what an academic comes up with ends up being applicable to a larger audience, but that's not the goal. Industry is where people try to do things for others.
And a farmer myself, I can tell you there is no "labor shortage". Quite the opposite. I can't find enough farm work to do! I could easily grow my operation tenfold without breaking a sweat. But there are so many other farmers who want that work as well. It is hard to compete.
Are you a Japanese farmer? The context of the paper was Japanese, and there is absolutely a labour shortage. Your section of the world is a timy percentage, and whilst I'm glad you don't have a shortage, your experience is not the worlds.
That's fair, but the same thing is said here too. It's a common trope that gets repeated because it sounds catchy, not because it is true.
> and there is absolutely a labour shortage.
Is there? Everything I can find suggests that Japan is no different than here: That farmers want to do more, but struggle to grow their operations under to the intense competition of every other farmer wanting to do the same.
What you find here, and seemingly also in Japan, is some farms that have gotten too big for their britches that cry "labor shortage" instead of "you know, maybe I should downsize and let someone else have a turn". That's not a labor shortage. If you can bleed them dry selling them your technology, good on ya! You absolutely should. But there is no need to worry about them. Letting them fail solves the problem just the same.
But if what you say is true, please point me to where I can find all this unutilized farmland that cannot be managed because there isn't anyone to do it. I am quite interested in becoming the one to take it over. I may not be a Japanese farmer today, but life is not static.
* Doing the work in a completely different way would eliminate the need for more people doing the labor. In the case of Japan, there is a lot of small farmland. In the case of the US, farmland tends to be huge. I guess smaller farmland is more labor-intensive. Consolidating smaller strips of farmland into a larger piece of farmland may improve labor intensity. But that means that one person gets to do the farming for a higher margin and everybody else loses their profession.
* Lots of farmland is being worked by elderly people. At some point you can't do it anymore. Somebody not working in agriculture would have to give up their current job and go into agriculture. It's difficult to predict whether that will happen.
* Labor shortage often means "we can't find anybody who is willing to do it for 1000 yen per hour so there must be a labor shortage".
BTW, there are a lot of abandoned houses in Japan; many of them will come with some amount of farmland that could be used, but isn't used.
The only hard part is nailing down what people mean by “labor shortage”; resolving whether one exists under either the normal economic definition or the one people are actually using is pretty easy, but since the whole point of using the term is to mask that the actual complaint is about wages being too high, its really difficult to get people to admit what they are talking about.
Over here in Europe my country has a sky high unemployment, yet picking tomatoes is mostly done by immigrants from Southeast Asia. The pay for that hard work is so bad that most natives won't bother, but it's okay if your plan is to save for a few years with absolute minimum budget, and then return to somewhere with much lower cost of living. I guess it's just the same with Latin American migrants in America.
Japan has historically been pretty anti-immigration, so they might prefer robots over this arrangement.
Using the technical definition, it's actually pretty easy. There is also a colloquial definition. But under the colloquial definition it is not just pretty difficult, its is actually impossible as it isn't real thing.
> But that means that one person gets to do the farming for a higher margin and everybody else loses their profession.
Here's what happens here: One large farmer captures most of the market and then relies on farm workers to get the job done, while small farmers are left under-utilized. It seems the same is true in Japan. After all, we're talking about farm laborers, not famers. The small-plot farmer who is also doing all the work doesn't need legions of employees.
Which is all well and good, but when the larger farmer reaches the limits of how many people they can hire, the solution is simple: Cut back. The under-utilized farmers will happily step in to fill the gap.
> It's difficult to predict whether that will happen.
It might not happen, but if it doesn't happen, it wasn't ever needed. Do you see a reason for farmers to farm for no reason? I don't mean no reason like overproducing to ensure there is still food in the event of a catastrophe. That is actually a valid reason, even if it doesn't always seem like it. I mean like produce it and then immediately turn it back into the ground.
Unfortunately, also in academia you cannot just do what interests you, unless you got unlimited funding somehow. Because also academia requires money. For you to live and to fund your research. And this does not get handed out freely, you got to apply for it - and you only get it, if your needs match the needs of those giving out the grants. Now yes, there is more possibility to do research not bound by a concrete practical application, but the framing is really not correct. You cannot just research what you want (Source, I left academia to do my independent research of what I want, what I could not do there)
Okay, but you cannot be both in academia and accepting someone else's funding to work on their problems at the same time. Once you accept the latter, you've moved into industry.
That's not to say academia becomes off-limits. You can also spend time out of your day working on your own pursuits — you get 24 hours to divide as you please. But when your time is focused on someone else's interests, you are not in academia. You are in industry.
There is sometimes external funding from industry towards academia with a concrete research and there is internal (taxpayer/internal money) funding in academia. Both are not handed out freely.
There is basic research, not tied to any concrete practical problem, but there never is random research. Professors have some freedom, but have to answer. The type of academia you describe only exists as a wanted Utopia, not as reality.
For example, I work for a company called Genentech that was founded by an academic. They discovered something important (how to clone genes) and shortly after, found medical applications (human growth hormone and insulin) that transformed treatment,
We carry out open-ended research on human biology, have many visitors from academia, along with dual appointments (person is both a professor and a scientist at the company), publish in the same journals as academics, etc...
And this is highly incentivized by the government: Bayh-Dole act makes universities want to patent tech that gets licensed by industry.
This is the first time anyone has even considered that someone could be forever stuck an academic or industry operative, or that industry can't take place in universities and academics in private businesses. Good on you for coming up with hypothetical alternatives suitable for a sci-fi thriller. You've clearly got a creative mind! But since they are only hypothetical, it is not clear what purpose they serve here or how it even could begin to relate to anything being discussed.
Making things sound useful might help with funding? It does for some people and in some places.
What I saw in the article was a prototype and see no reason for it to be "field ready."
This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.
So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.
[1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...
> working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.
It depends who the immigrants are. If your immigration laws favour highly skilled immigrants that is not going to happen.
In the UK people who live in ethnically mixed areas tend to integrate. In fact, I think most people integrate but the minority who do not are just more noticeable and used politically (not by just one side either).
It's racists, being racist, and likely conflating skin color with cultural differences.
My bigger concern to me is a conglomerate like ConAgra for robot farming comes in and only leases access to these machines instead of being able to buy/maintain/adapt them on the farms themselves. Leading to one more point of pressure against smaller farms in favor of larger conglomerates squeezing every bit of value from the middle out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uujse8pEvBk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp1KtHV9lTA
Or if it makes more sense to just let them fall, identify and pick up the leaves from the floor/plant pot