Servo - December 2013

So Long, Casey Jones

Although Americans are more inclined to think of wool and Foster's as the main Australian imports, our friends "down under" have been making big bucks exporting iron ore since the 1960s and 1970s — particularly to China. In fact, three Aussie companies (Rio Tinto Group, Vale, and BHP Billiton) control nearly 60 percent of the

$145 billion global market. Much of the ore is moved by trains which naturally are operated by engineers. Hauling ore from remote mines to seaports is not exactly pleasant work but the mining boom — along with pressure from the Construction, Forestry, Mining, and Energy Union — has gradually pushed about 400 engineer’s salaries up to a whopping $224,000 per year. Apparently, the mining companies feel like that's a push too far and have decided to use robotics to solve the problem.

Mining giant Rio Tinto, for example, has allocated a reported $7.2 billion to upgrade its operations, including $518 million to build the world's first fully automated heavy-haul rail system. The rail will have

930 miles of track and 10,000 ore wagons, and each train will stretch over nearly 1.5 miles. Vale is taking a different tack by replacing a large portion of its network with a 23 mile system of conveyor belts. BHP is conducting a trial of 12 driverless trucks. Reportedly, industry regulators in the USA and Canada are somewhat resistant to this level of automation, particularly in light of the runaway train carrying crude oil that derailed and exploded in Quebec last July, killing 47 people and destroying 30 buildings. That train was under the operation of a single engineer who had parked it and left for the night. Even a spokesman for the Aussie union had to acknowledge that "you're never going to win the argument against technology."

Experimental driverless ore truck.

8 SERVO 12.2013 by Jeff and Jenn Eckert Robytes

Bye, Bye, Berry Pickers

Strawberry pickers aren't paid on the level of Aussie railroad engineers (but neither are most thoracic surgeons), but they can rake in between $10 and $15 per hour, according to strawberryplants.org. But maybe not for long. Japanese agricultural machinery maker Shibuya Seiki ( www.shibuya-sss.co.jp) has teamed up with the National Agriculture and Food Research Organisation ( www.naro .af frc.go.jp) to develop a robot that moves on rails between rows of berries (which tend to be grown in greenhouses in Japan) and snatches one off the plants every eight seconds. The bot uses two digital cameras to judge which ones are ripe (and to calculate the distance to the objective), snaps a high-res photo of each berry, and finally snips it off and drops it into a basket. Eight seconds per strawberry may not sound all that impressive, but that comes to 6. 4 minutes for a quart of medium-sized ones, as opposed to 15 minutes per quart for a relatively inexperienced human picker. Plus, the bot can pick continuously — night and day. The system will be available early next year for about $50,000.