[QAPereo]

To reference an earlier article on HN, this reads like a future of, "Robot, observe these field workers picking fruit for a week. Now practice in this field for a day. OK, now the job is yours.

What I can't tell at all from this article is whether that day is years or decades away.

[gallerdude]

Yeah, I think “easily programmable humanoid” will be up there with the smartphone, maybe even the computer in terms of impact. Imagine walking into a restaurant, telling the app what food you want, and having a robot walk it over to you. Imagine going to a retail store, giving a voice query of what you’re looking for, and have a robot bring back the best candidates. Imagine owning an Etsy shop, but having a robot automate the entire creation process. Imagine...

[joshvm]

This is unlikely to be how the fruit pickers of the future work (though I get your point). Using a robotic arm like this is an extremely expensive way of solving the problem. That's ignoring the technical challenges like accurate localisation of fruit in small clusters, not damaging crop, dealing with occlusions from leaves, etc.

My personal opinion, having worked a little on this problem, is that it's very much like autonomous driving. Getting 90% of the job done is fairly straightforward, but getting that final 10% to make a system commercially viable will take years. Commercial growers don't (yet) have any pressure on labour - it's too readily available and too cheap.

http://www.agrobot.com/ solves this in quite a neat way. Rather than grasping the fruit, they just scoop up each berry in a cup with a blade on one side which severs the stem. This means you don't care about the precise shape of the berry either.

[Swizec]

> whether that day is years or decades away

Yes, it's both. Depends on the task.

Afaik we can already program industrial robots by showing them what to do. Robot records movement in its actuators, then keeps replaying over and over.

And we already have machine learning agents that can observe your behavior and learn which news stories are "good" news stories and which aren't. (algo newsfeeds). You could use them to observe a magazine editor and after a few issues, you'd have a robo editor.

[webmaven]

That's not "showing them what to do" it is more along the lines of "hand-holding".

[ragebol]

https://xkcd.com/1425/

It reall, really depends on the job. And in a job, maybe some subtasks can be automated.

Perhaps the picking cannot be automated, but the transportation can. Or instead of computer vision, have a person click the fruit on a screen so the robot know where to pick.

[briga]

Crazy to think that something that was considered "virtually impossible" (image recognition) a few years ago is relatively easy today.