With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So this is something in the robotics field that has been long-coming. If you'd like to get an idea of what the future holds for people, take a look at cows, a creature that has a lot of financial value. The idea is that the cow is tagged to be uniquely identified, when the cow approaches a service center, for say salt or food, the system reads the ID and delivers an appropriate form of nourishment. When the cow is uncomfortable due to lack of milking, the system milks the cow. Next up, I'm sure, will be automated detection of sick cows along with some basic veterinary interdiction. Finally it would be very easy to add a little bit of behavioral control to the system, either a mild shock, a noise, or some other stimulus to gently train the animal over time. I could even imagine a farm without fences, managed completely by robots and conditioned cows. The cows are happy, the people are happy.
Pretty cool. Also a bit unnerving.
I don't think there needs to be a robot revolt. I think over a few centuries they'll just slowly manage us into extinction, where we will most likely belong.
Once driverless cars are perfected, driverless tractors will be right there with them too, they will be hugely popular.
If you think about it, driverless tractors are a much easier problem than driving a car.
Where I live they grow a lot of pea's and the period between "ready to harvest" and "pig food" is pretty short, it's a spectacular sight at night watching them go up and down the hills near here in the dark (always reminds me of War of the Worlds as they have rotating spotlights) harvesting.
Long-term, that is a dead end. The thing is, you don't have to bring in your cows, and certainly not all at the same time, if you have a milking robot. They will come in by themselves if they want to be milked.
Also, I find it curious that this is news. Milking robots have been used for decades (since the early 1990's)
Economically, we have about reached the point where the robot is economically feasible (a robot increases milk production, but costs money, both in investments and in electricity. It's not a given that the increase in milk production pays for the extra costs)
Obligatory link to Manna (sci-fi story about robots and bots impact on humans) - http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks.
I am not qualified to statistically prove the automation trend, but I believe you are being obtuse in rejecting the premise that said trend exists at all.
"Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks."
It really is amazing how difficult some of these problems are. That was the point of GP's post. By saying "currently" you wave away that point without addressing it.
While robots are getting better, there are lots of things we take for granted about human and animal competence and that we have made very slow progress on replicating in robots.
It's much more fun to think and talk about those tricky bits than to simply expect them to be solved.
I don't need statistical proof that there is an automation trend. I'd like an argument about why the interesting hard parts are going to turn out to be doable.
You might infer from my username that I am moderately optimistic.
I'm far more optimistic on these problems, as I've seen many of them solved.
Lettuce picking (and other ground crops shortly) thinned and picked by machine? Check.
Strawberry sorting for plant quality? Check.
Strawberry harvesting? Check.
Harvesting of tree crops? Check.
Orange grove navigation by tractors? Check.
Ex: http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/usda/ http://farmofthefuture.net/#/slideshow/autonomous-tractors-t... http://farmindustrynews.com/precision-guidance/new-driverles... http://www.agprofessional.com/news/JD-autonomous-tractors-ar... https://www.asme.org/engineering-topics/articles/robotics/sm...
Sorry for that mistake, and thanks for the links.
Automatic berry picking for "tree type" bushes is a reality as well.
The problem is that a farm is a dirty, corrosive, and stochastic place.
Equipment needs to be tough as nails and able to deal with each unique farmers challenges.
Things I see on the horizon :
Robotic weeding is going to be a HUGE deal. Improved robotic harvesting also. These both are almost entirely reliant on robust computer vision that can survive days in the field.
Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above.
The promise is big, but integrating tech seamlessly is going to be damn hard.
I believe that one is already a reality. Some quick Googling turns up: http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html I'm pretty sure I saw a TV special too.
Surely, these projects sow the seeds of eventual progress.
I'm sure that there are areas to be improved upon, but I expect a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, as it were.
I also tend to think of farmers as the original hackers, they often have problems, and they cobble together a solution that might not be pretty, but works.
Once I finished some other projects I'll looking into Arduino or something similar to start hacking at some ideas I have.
By the way, you are indeed right that farmers have already done most of the hacking themselves.
I have/had a few ideas I was researching and at least one I plan on testing on my own acreage this summer. Figuring out how to market to a population that doesn't seem to have a big online presence is the hurdle I haven't crossed yet.
One of the things that I'm looking at (as a hobby research topic) are automating managed intensive rotational grazing for cattle and remote herd management.
Israel in particular has spent a fortune on research into robotizing fruit production, since they have money but have complex relations with neighbours that make cheap labour immigration unreliable. They are working very hard on all the literal hanging fruit.
The downside is that you need a lot of antibiotics for the cows. In the end, people will eat the meat and drink the milk of such animals plus a dose of antibiotics. More and more get an immunity.
So worse is better. (aka low tech agriculture with less animals in one farm building)
I was writing about big farming companies with many cows. To keep a lot of animals healthy in a narrow space you have to inject each cow antibiotics in advance.
Antibiotic in livestock is a real problem already - at least in the Europe. The media and the doctors speak open about the issues, yet some big farming companies don't care.
Everyone is fine if farmer inject antibiotics to ill cows. But giving all cows antibiotics all the time (in advance), just in case, is the problem. People will drink & eat it and if they get ill or are in hospital, the same antibiotics has no good effect anymore. And people already die because the aftermath (hospital bug).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Con...
It was inaccurate because the robotic milkers do not necessitate antibiotics in any way. There's no increased need for antibiotics because a cow is milked by a robot instead of a human.
> Antibiotic in livestock is a real problem already
In the dairy industry, if a cow is on antibiotics her milk is dumped at the order of the company that buys the milk for bottling and distribution to consumers. At least that's how it works on my neighbor's farm, who sells milk to a regional dairy distributor.
One robot can only deal with a relatively little amount of cows in a day. I remember something around a hundred. And industrial scale human-involved systems are at a much bigger scale. If anything, these large-scale systems would require more antibiotics.
Over time the antibiotic management should even improve through the availability of per-quarter, per-cow data on the performance of the cow. Some antibiosis is often necessary, and probably can't be avoided if you don't want cows suffering unduly, or getting culled because without treatment the cow won't be profitable anymore. But that is a whole different kind of animal... err.... discussion
In the United States, the use of antibiotics in livestock
is still prevalent. The FDA reports that 80 percent of
all antibiotics sold in 2009 were administered to
livestock animals, and that many of these antibiotics are
identical or closely related to drugs used for treating
illnesses in humans. Consequently, many of these drugs
are losing their effectiveness on humans, and the total
healthcare costs associated with drug-resistant bacterial
infections in the United States are between $16.6 billion
and $26 billion annually
The same goes for some countries in Europe. And as companies are importing goods from cheap farming companies such food can be found everywhere.
I can't see any connection between increased use of antibiotics and autonomous milking....
That takes care (formally) of a substantial part of Europe. Regulations such as these also tend to spread because they limit the ability to export produce that does not follow them (that's how lead-free soldering conquered the world based on a EU directive, and how Californian pollution limits for cars spread over the USA, etc)
If you think those rules get broken so often that this is more of a problem in Europe than in, say, the USA, Canada, Australia, or Asia, can you give a link?
"Confinement at high stocking density is one part of a
systematic effort to produce the highest output at the
lowest cost by relying on economies of scale, modern
machinery, biotechnology, and global trade. Confinement
at high stocking density requires the use of antibiotics
and pesticides to mitigate the spread of disease and
pestilence exacerbated by these crowded living
conditions. In addition, antibiotics are used to
stimulate livestock growth by killing intestinal
bacteria."
An even better article is on the German Wikipedia: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensivtierhaltung#Antibiotika...