Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
Regarding the Tesla show, the bus thing looks like a miniature of the robot transporters in said iRobot.
What I really don’t understand is the humanoid robots. I’ve seen videos over the last couple of weeks with people showing videos of how the robots could replace farmers working in fields by pulling up weeds or potatoes etc. Or replacing workers in factories etc.
Have none of these people ever seen a modern farm? Have they never been to a modern factory production line? We already have industrial machines to do this much more efficiently than an android could ever do it!
“By 2027, robots (video showing an iRobot like android in a field) could pull up weeds or harvest crops faster than a human!” Only, ploughs, tractors, harvesters etc. have been doing that for well over a century or for centuries (depending on the level of technology). There are AI powered laser weeders that can automatically identify and kill weeds over a 20M wide stretch of a field and they just drive up and down the field at normal speed, how is an android supposed to be more efficient than a weeder that can cover all the weeds over a 20M stretch, while the humanoid robot can pull up a single weed?
It is the same for various harvesting machines, pulling up rows of salad, carrots, potatoes, corn etc. quickly and efficiently, but these android totting tech bros want to replace these hi-tech machines with an android that does the job much more slowly, but completely autonomously…
The same for factories. We already have industrial robots that pretty much run production lines, they just need an overseer to check on them. Fiat’s advertising in the 1970s for the Ritmo/Strada was that the car was built by robots… Now the tech bros want to remove the robots that are designed to do a job efficiently and replace them with awkward humanoid shaped robots that are slower and less efficient!
Why? What have these guys been smoking and why are so many people so excited about it? It seems to be the same people who are breathlessly exclaiming how good crypto currency is and now breathlessly exclaiming how humanoid form robots will replace workers, who were replaced 20-30 years ago by non-humanoid robots who do the jobs faster than a humanoid form could ever hope to achieve.
It is as if these guys are stuck in some 1950s sci-fi world, where agricultural and industrial techniques never progressed and we don’t already have much more efficient ways of doing these tasks…
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I agree that a lot of Ag is done with harvesters and purpose built machines, but that isnt universal. Fruit picking for example.
The question still remains if this market can be economically and reliably served by a Tesla Robot. I have my doubts.
For the first one, there are already cherry harvesters.
Abundant robotics already have an apple harvester robot.
Ktbl has a harvesting system for peppers.
Asparagus is a difficult one. Germany has huge asparagus growing regions, but cutting the stalk at the right depth in the earth is a skilled job and that is still mainly done by hand, but Cerescon in the Netherlands has a robot to do the job and there have been mechanical harvesters for about half a decade now.
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