History Fragments: The Beginning of an Agricultural Revolution
Morikawa says his engineers had their breakthrough idea right there in the orange grove. They realized that the task could be divided between two robots: One would locate all the oranges, and the second would pick them. “Once you know where all the fruit is, then it becomes an easy job to calculate the most efficient way to pick it all,” says Morikawa.
[...]
The farmers are willing to pay up because they’ve been rattled by a labor shortage over the past few years — California growers tell horror stories of watching their fruit rot on the trees as they waited for the picking crews to arrive. Last fall, growers rallied in front of the U.S. Capitol, frustrated that Congress still hadn’t created a program to ease the passage of foreign guest workers across the Mexico border.
With the supply-and-demand equation uncertain, growers see the robots as a better option. “You can predict what it’s going to cost to buy a machine and maintain it,” says Baskin. “You can’t predict the bargaining that we go through with contract labor,” he says.
Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers, from Wired Magazine, 21st June 2007
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