Robotic Following Cart to Replace Light Duty Tractor Tasks?

[candersen10]

We are aiming to do a commercial demo video (hopefully this weekend - stay tuned) with the ability to follow operator coded. Planned uses (we can't do harvests now because of the season) that we could demo on our vegetable/fruit/mixed livestock farm (Charlestown Farm and Broadwater Farm and Broadwater Cidery

(1) Following carrying bins of apple prunings (which we remove right off to avoid spreading disease)
(2) Setting up electric fencing - carrying tools, posts, etc. behind while stringing up wire
(3) Carrying landscaping wagon type bed with trays of transplant bins
(4) Dump Bed shuttling mulch to spread around apple trees
(5) Carrying around heavy tools from hand labor type job to hand labor type job (we're planning to put some of )
(6) Carrying small bails of hay through man gates to feed sheep/goats/horses
(7) Collecting firewood to bring from collection point right into to house
(8) Pulling weeds out of area into bins as it follows behind
(9) Separate video of it hauling a beer cooler

Unfortunately, nothing to harvest right now so we can't demo the use case we really think it is ideal for right now. Any thoughts on other handy uses for a cart that followed you around a farm?

Also, we do appreciate the naysayers and the feedback (both negative and positive). If there's no demand we shouldn't build it. We are getting feedback that is positive from commercial growers in different fruit/vegetable spaces however hence the continued pursuit of the idea.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

This one is pretty impressive...

Just be sure to watch it until the "blooper" at the very end...

I can't tell with those Boston Dynamics videos whether the robots are moving fully under their own control or whether a person is directing them, more like a RC car. In a couple of shots you see a person in the background with a radio controller.

 

[MossRoad]

Yep. Some are remote controlled. Some aren't. Many of the videos are of development and research. Some show the robots still teathered to cables. Still, pretty neat stuff!!!

 

[MossRoad]

Anyone remember the android Bishop's Knife Trick in Aliens?

RIP Bill Paxton...

 

[TheMadOne]

Good point - we will swing by Little's soon to speak with them. Believe they cater more towards the landscaping/lawn care segments rather than the AG space. Do you think there could be a market in landscaping?

Re: Material handling being well handled, is that always the case? It seems like there are still a lot of people walking around with buckets, bins, carts, wheelbarrows, etc. on farms to shuttle things back and forth from one point to another right? What if those people had a cart that did the shuttling, and they could just work at the pick point? Could that have value in some applications? We look at an industry like table grapes, where it appears that about 15-20% of the labor in picking is shuttling picked produce from pick point to collection point. If Burro worked there at least, it would have value we believe, and there are over 120K acres in the US and a crop worth something like $1.8B. Off base?

Re: expectations, it seems like much of your point is that our machine will be too expensive, too fragile, not carry enough, not be able to cross rough terrain, and that AGR will be unable to produce it or service/support it. On the cost portion (the other points seem very solve-able) would you pay 3-4K for something like this though? That particular machine has a 750 pound payload, but requires an operator and can't shuttle itself back and forth.

Does something that shuttles payloads back in forth at least sounds like a handy thing for some applications where you have to pick something, shuttle it back somewhere, and then come back to keep picking? Sounds like your answer is no.

My point wasn't any of the above, perhaps I was a bit to brief in my last post. That list of questions is one you should ask every time before you bring a product to market. Not so that there's some pie in the sky goal, but so that you know the answers going in, and have a clear head about what your expectations should be. I've passed on licensing/building custom equipment before because the answers to those questions for that product didn't align with our company's goals.

There's another consideration that I don't see mentioned anywhere. The extra worker who's job is to unload the machine at the home station. Unless you can automate that, your customer will have to both be willing to supply each field worker with a 4500 dollar device, and bring on a laborer to man the home station. For round numbers sake, lets say that each worker spends 10% of their 10 hour day going to and from the central collection point. So this 4500 dollars buys an extra hour per day per worker, or rather 4600 does, due to the five hour battery life and 100 dollar battery price I saw cited a few pages back. But there has to be somebody working at the collection hub unloading and restocking the burros, as well as pulling the dead batteries and installing the fresh ones at the halfway point. So you now have a worker who has to be on hourly wage, rather than being paid per pick, and pickers who can now earn more money from you per day. And you've spent 4600 per picker. As a farm boss I don't see the math working out unless you have an extremely time sensitive crop and an incredible shortage of workers.

Is there a market for your product? I'm sure there is. There's a market for pretty much anything. But my back of the napkin math leads me to believe it would be more expensive for the normal produce operation than hiring a dedicated collector on a small tractor/skid loader, who could work with multiple pickers at once, carry much more weight, and last more than five hours at a go.

For instance, I've seen one vineyard work harvest. They pre-stage 5 gallon buckets all along the rows. Pickers go down the rows filling the buckets as they come to them and leaving them where they were. A collector comes and gets the full buckets, empties them into bins, takes the bins back to storage, and leapfrogs past the pickers, re-staging the now empty buckets. Rinse and repeat. I have no idea if this is industry standard practices, but it seems pretty straightforward to me, and since you'd need the collection worker even with the burros...not really seeing the economics of switching.

Also, for truly industrial operations these exist.

Then there's all the other produce that has mechanical pickers already developed. Pik-rite has pickers for tomatoes, peppers, chili peppers, cucumbers, and carrots, and I'm sure there's other companies out there with units for other produce.

 

[Creamer]

When I first saw this thread my thoughts were totally different. I was thinking of a lightweight cart that would follow me around the yard for very light duty things such as picking up twigs. If I could signal it to come to me so I wouldn't have to go get it and then have it follow me around it would make my life much easier. Then have a simple manual dump system to unload the cargo. I could see it for picking the garden, twigs, grass clippings, carrying things out to the flowerbed as a worktable, and lots of other little jobs. It would have to be very low cost and of course low powered for safety. Even getting on and off a golf car or Gator is a hassle when you are picking up sticks - this would be much easier.

Start simple and get the coolness in the market and then branch out to bigger and better. A simple $500 follow cart for yards would sell big time. the coolness factor alone would sell it.

 

[quicksandfarmer]

We are aiming to do a commercial demo video (hopefully this weekend - stay tuned) with the ability to follow operator coded. Planned uses (we can't do harvests now because of the season) that we could demo on our vegetable/fruit/mixed livestock farm (Charlestown Farm and Broadwater Farm and Broadwater Cidery

(1) Following carrying bins of apple prunings (which we remove right off to avoid spreading disease)
(2) Setting up electric fencing - carrying tools, posts, etc. behind while stringing up wire
(3) Carrying landscaping wagon type bed with trays of transplant bins
(4) Dump Bed shuttling mulch to spread around apple trees
(5) Carrying around heavy tools from hand labor type job to hand labor type job (we're planning to put some of )
(6) Carrying small bails of hay through man gates to feed sheep/goats/horses
(7) Collecting firewood to bring from collection point right into to house
(8) Pulling weeds out of area into bins as it follows behind
(9) Separate video of it hauling a beer cooler

Unfortunately, nothing to harvest right now so we can't demo the use case we really think it is ideal for right now. Any thoughts on other handy uses for a cart that followed you around a farm?

Also, we do appreciate the naysayers and the feedback (both negative and positive). If there's no demand we shouldn't build it. We are getting feedback that is positive from commercial growers in different fruit/vegetable spaces however hence the continued pursuit of the idea.

View attachment 500456

Those are all good use cases -- which is why I think instead of a specialized machine you should be thinking about a general purpose machine that can be configured for specific tasks.

I will say that following an operator is not nearly as complicated as a robot navigating by itself. It's not even really an evolutionary step on the way. It's like adding single digit numbers compared to playing chess.

 

[MossRoad]

... Even getting on and off a golf car or Gator is a hassle when you are picking up sticks - this would be much easier....

We have several of these in our family. You get them from the hospital re-hab when you can't bend down to put your socks or pants on. When you get better, you let your grandkids play with them. Then you find out how really useful they are. Keep one on your golf cart. You can pick up a quarter with these things. Sticks is no problem. Lots of groundskeepers keep these and a 5 gallon bucket on their mowers. Works great. About $20 at Walmart.

 

[candersen10]

My point wasn't any of the above, perhaps I was a bit to brief in my last post. That list of questions is one you should ask every time before you bring a product to market. Not so that there's some pie in the sky goal, but so that you know the answers going in, and have a clear head about what your expectations should be. I've passed on licensing/building custom equipment before because the answers to those questions for that product didn't align with our company's goals.

There's another consideration that I don't see mentioned anywhere. The extra worker who's job is to unload the machine at the home station. Unless you can automate that, your customer will have to both be willing to supply each field worker with a 4500 dollar device, and bring on a laborer to man the home station. For round numbers sake, lets say that each worker spends 10% of their 10 hour day going to and from the central collection point. So this 4500 dollars buys an extra hour per day per worker, or rather 4600 does, due to the five hour battery life and 100 dollar battery price I saw cited a few pages back. But there has to be somebody working at the collection hub unloading and restocking the burros, as well as pulling the dead batteries and installing the fresh ones at the halfway point. So you now have a worker who has to be on hourly wage, rather than being paid per pick, and pickers who can now earn more money from you per day. And you've spent 4600 per picker. As a farm boss I don't see the math working out unless you have an extremely time sensitive crop and an incredible shortage of workers.

Is there a market for your product? I'm sure there is. There's a market for pretty much anything. But my back of the napkin math leads me to believe it would be more expensive for the normal produce operation than hiring a dedicated collector on a small tractor/skid loader, who could work with multiple pickers at once, carry much more weight, and last more than five hours at a go.

For instance, I've seen one vineyard work harvest. They pre-stage 5 gallon buckets all along the rows. Pickers go down the rows filling the buckets as they come to them and leaving them where they were. A collector comes and gets the full buckets, empties them into bins, takes the bins back to storage, and leapfrogs past the pickers, re-staging the now empty buckets. Rinse and repeat. I have no idea if this is industry standard practices, but it seems pretty straightforward to me, and since you'd need the collection worker even with the burros...not really seeing the economics of switching.

Also, for truly industrial operations these exist.

Then there's all the other produce that has mechanical pickers already developed. Pik-rite has pickers for tomatoes, peppers, chili peppers, cucumbers, and carrots, and I'm sure there's other companies out there with units for other produce.

From what we have seen, about 1/2 of US fruit acreage is hand picked, and about a 1/4 of vegetable. The pellenc grape harvester you included in your video is interesting. Not all grapes can be mechanically harvested however. Indeed, it seems like many crops cannot be mechanically harvested. We have no interest in trying to compete with Pellenc, Oxbo, Gregoire, Pik-Rite, Spudnik, etc.

Logistically, we can size the batteries to get a full day's charge with 10 or 20 miles of range we think, depending on payload. In terms of runners dumping, at least in certain crops we see some post processing being done out in the field so there are often people at collection points (table grapes for instance) washing/batching/collecting/boxing/trimming, etc. We could likely design a bin drop off bed fairly easily also depending on crop/bin type.

 

[mcj115]

Would the cart have the ability to follow a user through a field, create a map of where it follow and them autonomously repeat that mapped trial through the field? If it can autonomously repeat a mapped route of field then I could see potential application for sprayer application for an aqueous insecticide or fertilizer. Heck it may be stretch but it could be used to deliver metered water to crops in a dry/drought situation to extend the crops life...I couldn't see it engineering enough water to keep crops gong during a drought but it it could extend their life another week or two for better weather to hit there may be a market.