[Baeocystin]

Speaking as someone who knows farmers- they do, in fact, consider going into the silo a dangerous task, because everyone knows some family that had someone die because of it. They do it anyway, because it needs to get done, but they are quite aware of the risk. Everything on a farm has to earn its keep in terms of ROI, and so will this robot. It may or may not be cost effective, and we'll see. But please don't downplay the very real danger, just because some folks have to manage it because of their job.

[nimbius]

"Blue-collar" worker here. safety is the first trade we learn in school and the first job we start at every site. Your real uphill battle with this thing isnt going to be safety, its repair. Can I fix it with a stick welder and parts from a Tractor Supply? If not, its just another John Deere money machine.

If you REALLY want farmers to use it, make it OPEN SOURCE.

[celticninja]

Doesn't have to be open source, just needs to be repairable on site, not in a week's time when someone comes out to it. In that time someone has to risk their life to do the job it should be doing.

[megablast]

Clearly not true. The safest thing you can do on a worksite is leave. But people still work there.

[bontaq]

It sure seems that way, across all the youtube farming channels I watch, one thing that ties them together is they do not like going into the silo and do consider it unsafe. I have no idea what OP is talking about besides their imagination.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7oxLIP1RRo here's a whole episode about grain bin rescue training. They raised $60,000 for first responders in their grain bin safety campaign.

[the-pigeon]

The entire idea that "x workers don't care about safety" is just dumb.

Yes some individuals care less than they should. But every job has some people who are smart enough to value their own safety. And those people will seriously consider any device the significantly increases safety.

[tialaramex]

Humans (not any specific type of worker) are bad about risk versus convenience trade offs. They really like dangerous shortcuts as an example. Like, people who are on the clock, and they see there's a safe route to the work site, but if you cut down this steep embankment it's slightly quicker, although you might fall to your death... Humans will take that shortcut. Even though they're on the clock! They are risking death to save somebody else money, where is the sense in that? But that's not why they're doing it, they're doing it because it seems convenient. So we have to arrange things to make unsafe practices also inconvenient and then humans stop doing them. Put a fence along that steep drop, now you'd have to climb a fence and it's no longer a shortcut, so they use the safe route.

[throwaway0a5e]

>Humans (not any specific type of worker) are bad about risk versus convenience trade offs.

This is just a fancy way of calling people stupid because they don't do what you want.

Literally every subject you can think of is inundated with people complaining that the common man doesn't care enough or isn't doing it right.

"nice boat you've got there"

-no financial planner ever

[tialaramex]

> This is just a fancy way of calling people stupid because they don't do what you want.

Not people, humans, I'm sure some non-humans can get this right.

And it's not that they don't do what I want, they don't do what they want.

[neatze]

It is not only that, awareness plays crucial role in safety, there are numerous factors that negatively effects awareness, some factors might not be related to job at all, it might be "simple" commutative cognitive fatigue. Arguably, this issue is irrespective of training quality and/or understanding of job risks (smart), to large degree.

[dylan604]

>Yes some individuals care less than they should.

Is it really an amount of "care", or that some people just have an ability to not get bogged down by the scary stuff. There would be no X-Games at all if we were all wired the same. There are people that voluntarilly get off of their motorcycle at the apex of their jump to score some extra points. That's beyond insane to me, but to them it's part of the job.

[toomanybeersies]

Maybe I'm just a dirty socialist, but I don't really want to die in a preventable industrial accident, all because my employer didn't want to invest in workplace health and safety.

[Symbiote]

The alternatives suggested on [1] (from a different comment) are much cheaper: long poles, a safety harness, lock tag.

If farmers aren't already using those, why would they buy this?

[1] https://agfax.com/2019/02/18/grain-bins-sudden-death-4-ways-...

[bombcar]

> Consequences. Of the 22,215 passenger vehicle occupants killed in 2019, 47% were not wearing seat belts.

And I highly doubt half of those people were driving old cars with no seat belts.

If people can’t be arsed to use a simple safety tool it’s going to be a hard sell to build a robot.

Better would be to build a silo that has safety features built in and make it competitive on price.

[RobLach]

It looks more fun to use.