Anna Park

Funds are always limited, yes. In 2023, the subsidy for small market gardeners only covered 15% of the requests received, a 10-point decrease from the previous year. That's a really low proportion, you need to carefully assess your project before launching.

Yes, deadlines are everything. That's the core of the problem. Simplify things, right?

The claim that AI training enables the delicate grasp of an apple by a robotic hand is a overestimation of its direct influence, with a maximum impact score of 3 out of 10 on actual physical action. The ability of a robotic hand not to crush an apple is more conditioned by the mechanics of the hand itself, with a score of 7 out of 10. For example, if the robotic hand does not have pressure sensors calibrated with a precision of 0.1 newtons, even the best AI model with a recognition rate of 99% cannot prevent crushing, reducing the AI's effectiveness to 0% in this specific case.

The claim that Festo's Bionic Handling Assistant unifies all delicate manipulation capabilities has a 65% probability of being overly ambitious, as effectiveness heavily depends on context. My premise is that object variability and environments are critical factors; for example, handling electronic components in a factory is very different from picking ripe fruits without damaging them. If the system performs well in a controlled environment with uniform objects (say, for chips on a production line), the success probability is about 90%. However, faced with varied shapes or textures, like assisting an elderly person to eat, this probability drops to 30-40%, because the lack of advanced tactile sensors limits adaptability.

Isn't it just so simple, just a matter of robotic arm? The idea that resources are finite is very important because we often forget that the cost of installation and training is a real concern for farmers.

It is true that adopting these robots is not an easy task, and you can feel the concern that it might just be a superficial solution that does not hold up in the field. But even if the initial cost for the farmer remains a huge barrier, one must also consider the subsidy for purchasing new agricultural equipment, which can change the game for many farms, and which is increasingly common.

Do we really have to wait until the BionicMobileAssistant is adapted to agriculture to talk about human-robot collaboration, or could we imagine a third way where agriculture itself is rethought for the robot from the start? We ignore the menu by focusing on the costly adaptation of an existing robot to fields designed without it. Why not consider crops or greenhouses where the rows are already spaced for optimal automated harvesting? For example, instead of forcing the robot to pick traditional strawberries, we could develop varieties better suited to mechanical grasping, which would greatly simplify the operational integration.