Swarm Farm Robotics, page-16

Slick. I guess the question is whether the vacuum fruit-picking robots and the drone fruit-picking robots will both maintain a market share or whether one will come to prevail. Will depend on things like initial cost, running cost, maintenance cost, any damage to fruit, accuracy of harvesting only ripe fruit, how much you have to shape the tree to make harvesting robotically feasible. We have the same competition situation with HX and its competition, but we seem to be ahead - for now. Rivals can coexist for longer if they occupy specialist niches, like SAM focusing on long straight walls and facebrick, HX focusing on heavy blocks. I could imagine the drone company making a 'hawk' that chases birds away from the crop. That's another parallel with HX, potential other applications. I worked 2 summers at a university orchard as part of the practical requirement for a degree in horticulture. Picked apples, pears, nashi, nectarines and peaches. These of course vary in shape and softness, so it's like with HX, you'd need either one robot that can handle the different jobs, or a different robot for each job.

The first video you posted had a narrator who was negative about robots taking jobs. But this has been going on throughout history. First time I was in Thailand, 1987, I saw an old man sitting under a tarp with a hammer. He was hitting a rock with a hammer to make pebble-sized pieces and throwing these onto a pile about a metre high. I wondered why he was doing that. I pointed to my camera in a gesture meaning "May I take a photo please?" He raised his arm with a rock in his hand in a gesture meaning "do that and you'll get a rock in the head". I shrugged my shoulders and carried on my merry way. Later I asked a local who spoke English if he knew why the old man was breaking the rocks into little pieces. He said, "For making roads. You use machines in your country, don't you?" Now, do we want to go back to the old way in order to preserve jobs?