[HN Gopher] Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine indu...
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Autonomous robots to help modernize grape, wine industry
 
Author : PaulHoule
Score  : 40 points
Date   : 2022-11-17 14:31 UTC (8 hours ago)
 
web link (news.cornell.edu)
w3m dump (news.cornell.edu)
 
| andtheboat wrote:
| "People are part of terroir"
| 
| The most common type of machine automation in the wine industry
| is the use of optical sorters - no longer do you need rows of
| people separating good grapes from raisains and debris. The
| machine scans what's going through the shoot and uses multiple
| prongs to flick anything unwanted into a separate container. The
| sorters are even transportable to different wineries and
| vineyards.
| 
| The issue is that wine is not an engineering product, people
| don't want it all to taste the same. These machines do have
| calibration but in my experience we're getting too close to wine
| as a generic product. That is my fear with something like this -
| we know more than ever about grapes and when to harvest, we lose
| what makes a wine unique.
| 
| So while I praise this product and the exciting world of
| agricultural technology - just not sure it's the right direction
| for wine.
 
| sgu999 wrote:
| Just another way to replace moderately qualified jobs by some
| opaque tech. I understand why it happens, but this isn't
| progress. Making good wine requires dedication and experience
| from everyone involved, that's not what you'll buy when you get
| one of these perfectly controlled products. But let's Ikea
| everything non essential as well... that's good for the wealthy
| after all.
 
  | cinntaile wrote:
  | You'll still be able to buy wine from handpicked grapes, it'll
  | (eventually) just cost a premium.
 
| nanomonkey wrote:
| In Northern California's olive growing regions I've been noticing
| a trend towards tearing out old olive trees and replacing them
| with trees that are grown on trellises in the same fashion as
| grapes. This appears to be done to utilize the picking robots
| that were specialized for vineyards. It's interesting to think
| that pruning practices like espalier, coppicing and hedging could
| be brought back to utilize robotics efficiently for any number of
| fruiting trees and bushes.
| 
| Kinda wish we got rid of timber fences and just put up hedges of
| fruit trees all in between houses, with roaming robots to tend to
| their production.
 
  | alecco wrote:
  | That's weird. Most modern plantations use the "Super Intensive"
  | method with specialized machines.
  | 
  | https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=4RnDldkqUb4
 
    | nanomonkey wrote:
    | The video displays exactly what I'm talking about though. The
    | machinery is build around olive trees grown as hedges instead
    | of the traditional tree shapes that requires shaking or
    | ladders.
    | 
    | Olives as trees don't require wires to grow on like grape
    | vines, sorry if that was what you thought I was implying.
 
  | bergenty wrote:
  | Is that really a trend? Because olive trees take decades to
  | grow and at least 3 years to bear so I have a hard time
  | believing they're being ripped out and restarted.
 
    | nanomonkey wrote:
    | I believe some of this is due to changes in what types of
    | olives were considered desirable. I'm not an expert, but some
    | of the green stuffing olives have been replaced with
    | different varieties. Also there are pests and diseases that
    | are taking over, so newer resistant varieties are valuable
    | replacements.
    | 
    | Three years is also not a terrible time period compared to
    | other nut trees that are grown in the area, specially if
    | harvesting can be improved to be less manual. Some of the
    | trees that are being replaced are 80-100 years old, so the
    | wood can be a valuable resource that will cover the costs.
 
| josefresco wrote:
| I recently volunteered to help a local vineyard harvest their
| grapes. It was a learning experience, and I thought about robots
| and if they'd be suitable. Part of the "skill" involved was
| leaving grapes on the vine that hadn't ripened 100%. Furthermore,
| the care required to gently clip and extract the grapes from a
| "viney" plant without damage or loss was sometimes tricky. Hard
| to see a robot mastering the process, without changes in how the
| grapes are grown/attached.
 
  | bathMarm0t wrote:
  | Even more so when you see how quickly a skilled harvester runs
  | through a vineyard. They're pulling clusters almost every other
  | second.
 
    | shiftpgdn wrote:
    | No need for speed when your runtime costs nothing.
 
| matxd wrote:
| It looks like autonomous robots are on everyone's lips lately,
| that's awesome, because it's really interesting topic (at least
| for me). What would you suggest reading to create my first robot?
| I mean the hardware part, not the programming one. Thank you
 
  | amelius wrote:
  | The hard part about robotics is that you're interfacing with
  | the real world, where everything can go wrong. It's like you
  | take a program and run it on a CPU with a radiation source next
  | to it. All your strong invariants suddenly become a "maybe".
  | Not literally of course, but that's how it feels if you start
  | your robot for the 100th time thinking nothing can go wrong
  | this time ...
 
  | DoingIsLearning wrote:
  | 'Handbook of Robotics' by Siciliano & Khatib.
  | 
  | It covers a lot from principles to application, it was the book
  | that clicked for me in terms of understanding kinematics of
  | robots.
 
  | carapace wrote:
  | The old TAB books on robotics are pretty good IMO. Not the
  | electronics section, that's mostly out of date, but all the
  | physical stuff like motors and kinetics is still pretty
  | topical.
  | 
  | E.g. "The Complete Handbook of Robotics" by Edward L. Safford,
  | Jr. https://archive.org/details/completehandbook0000saff
  | 
  | - - - -
  | 
  | OOOooooo! See also "Cybernetics A to Z" by V. Pekelis that just
  | made it to the front page:
  | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33639261 It looks
  | fantastic!
 
    | PaulHoule wrote:
    | I remember my public library having that Safford book when i
    | was a kid and when the world was going crazy about C3P0 and
    | R2D2.
 
  | antoniuschan99 wrote:
  | I have a dobot mg400 but you can get a dobot magician or
  | elephant robotics cobots which are affordable too.
  | 
  | https://www.instagram.com/kokonautinc
 
  | iancmceachern wrote:
  | Check out the stuff at Pololu robotics, they have parts all the
  | way up to full kits
 
    | iancmceachern wrote:
    | Super weird thing to be downvited for
 
  | shiftpgdn wrote:
  | For practical experience the jetson nano jetbot is a really fun
  | project. Combines 3d printing, computer vision, motor control,
  | etc.
 
| iancmceachern wrote:
| There is low hanging fruit in this specific application for
| Agbots.
| 
| The way wine grapes are grown, carefully trained and groomed to
| grow in a line, a specific shape and orientation, almost like an
| entire field of carefully shaped bonsai trees. Once it's
| established, a vineyard doesn't change much year to year. It's a
| ideal place to start with agbots and get things right before
| going to more complicated applications. The labor costs are also
| high, and highly seasonal as many of these vineyards are in
| expensive coastal areas like Nor Cal.
 
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(page generated 2022-11-17 23:01 UTC)