robotic farming, robotic olive harvesting, robotic carrot harvesting, crop duster, robotic lettuce harvesting, robotic strawberry harvesting
ROBOTIC FARMING
Today's agriculture industry is very different from what it was a few decades ago. Powered machinery has replaced human labor and working animals. Demands for higher wages, limited access to low-wage migrant labor, and increased demand for produce year-round pushed the agriculture industry to embrace automation and mechanization many fruits and vegetables need to be harvested within a very small period. So the lack of available workers at just the right time can turn out to be a huge problem.
Before mechanization, it was very difficult for farming to be profitable because of the sheer number of people that had to work in the fields all year round. Moreover, the global population is nearing 8 billion so there is an ever-increasing pressure to transform fertile land into efficient farms that are capable of producing higher crop yields. We already have issues like water scarcity and environmental damage because of the overuse of chemicals and pollutants. Advanced agriculture technology will help us increase global food production and control the effect on our environment. So how did the agriculture industry move towards mechanization? Planting, maintaining, and harvesting crops is extremely tricky to automate because every single crop has a different need there isn't a one machine fits all solution to the problem. Rather than being intimidated by this fact the agriculture industry embraced it and created specialized machines for each crop. Crops like wheat corn and cotton can now be planted, maintained, and harvested mechanically with trivial human interruption.
Robotic Olive Harvesting
Picking
olive trees by hand was a painstakingly slow process. Nowadays farmers use an
olive harvesting machine that shakes the tree strips it off fruit and then
separates the olives with a pneumatic sorter.
Robotic Lettuce Harvesting
Lettuce
is also difficult to harvest manually. Workers had to spend days bending over
and standing up repeatedly which often led to back problems. Lettuce harvesting
machines that can triple productivity use a waterjet system to cut the
vegetables.
Robotic Carrot Harvesting
Carrot harvester agricultural machines pull hundreds of plant roots out of the soil gently at a time. Cut the tops off and drop them back into the fields while collecting the carrots in a storage tank.
There are still certain labor-intensive areas of Agriculture that have been protected from mechanization mainly because the product is so fragile and they are highly dependent on human visual perception. For example, delicate vegetables like asparagus are still harvested by hand with labor costs at 71 percent of production costs and up to 44% of selling costs. Certain ornamental plants and flowers also rely heavily on manual labor but machine learning is being integrated into these agriculture machines to mimic human behavior and visual perception. So they can be used to harvest delicate crops as well.
Robotic Citrus Harvesting
An
ENERGID has developed a robotic citrus harvesting system that uses three-dimensional
machine vision algorithms to make a computer model of an entire orange tree and
then stores the location of each fruit that information will be passed on to
the machine robotic arms.
Robotic Strawberry Harvesting
Agri
BOTS a start-up in Spain has developed a robotic strawberry Harvester that has
a camera-based vision system that analyzes each fruit individually based on
color and form variations. The ripe delicate fruit is then cut from its stems
and gently placed on a conveyor belt that leads to the packaging area.
Crop Duster
Crop dusters have the third highest mortality rate among professions in the US. 90% of crop spring in Japan is now done using small unmanned helicopters. Precision application of fertilizer or pesticides to individual plants or even to specific fruits growing on a tree could potentially reduce the use of chemicals by up to 80%. This also reduces the amount of toxic runoff which ultimately pollutes rivers streams and other bodies of water.
As
a result of this massive investment in technology and automation, the
agriculture industry has surpassed other industries in terms of productivity in
the late 19th century nearly 50% of US workers were employed on farms. But by
2000 that had dropped to just below 2 percent even though millions of jobs were
lost in the process. Those unemployed farmhands were forced to move into cities
in such factory work. Those workers eventually found jobs in the manufacturing
sector and they ended up earning higher wages than they used to be in the
fields.
Innovations in the agriculture field can positively impact the construction field.
So how does this relate to the building construction industry while we can find numerous parallels between the two they both face unpredictable site conditions and are at the mercy of nature? Every sub-sector also faces unique challenges that are difficult to quantify. For example, in the construction field, the challenge is faced by a wood or a metal framer are different than those faced by the electrical guys or the plumbing guys. Similar to the agriculture field where every single crop has to be maintained and harvested differently. However, while the agriculture industry pulled itself out of low productivity and faced these challenges head-on the construction industry still seems to be stuck in the past. There have been some attempts to standardize construction with prefabrication but for the most part, construction is still very wasteful and relies heavily on manual labor which is turning out to be its downfall. Older skill labor has reached a time and age and there isn't enough younger labor to take their place.
The construction market is also facing demands for higher wages. All these issues are contributing to a shortage of housing worldwide and also poor quality of construction. The construction industry didn't anticipate this problem and get ahead of it. So they have fallen behind while other sectors have embraced automation and the Big Data phenomenon it has barely impacted the construction industry. We can find a few examples of automation like an excavation robot and a bricklaying robot but unfortunately, they haven't been embraced on a wide scale.
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