I heard about many companies in this space that have since shut down / become acquihired. Root AI acquired by AppHarvest [1], Abundant Robotics (shut down) [2], Traptic acquired by Bowery [3].

To me, this suggests that the problem is hard. Last I checked, the state of the art in robotic grasping seems similar to the state of many other AI systems before ML hit the scene. It's super-mathematized all to the questionable end of analyzing how a few points points can optimally apply forces to simple convex polytopes.

A similar feeling exists when you look at the state of path planning for robotic arms. There, collisions must be avoided at all costs because we don't have the mathematics for it. So you make this super precise plan that carefully snakes its way around all the little voxels that happen to become occupied in your occupancy grid. To execute these plans we need to manufacture robots with expensive harmonic gearing and sub-millimeter level repeatability. These types of robots would not be economical for outdoor picking tasks.

To make progress, I think there will have to be new ML techniques and new lower cost robotic hardware developed in tandem.

[1] https://www.appharvest.com/press_release/appharvest-acquires... [2] https://www.therobotreport.com/abundant-robotics-shuts-down-... [3] https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/16/following-acquisition-by-b...

John Deere can and likely will swallow up anything that seems interesting in this space. They already largely are.

Source: Worked on AI in the Ag Industry.

I doubt these will take off unless climate- or politically driven migration slows, which seems unlikely in either case, or we stumble across a fountain of cheap energy. A lot of farm work in the US is performed by undocumented immigrants paid incredibly low wages and too often treated incredibly badly. I don't see the cost of robots coming down much if supply chain instability and energy scarcity continue. (This is not to say it wouldn't be better to use robots, or pay people a good wage and provide good working conditions.)

Plus, a lot of work in precision agriculture is overhyped and oversold. I worked in the space for a couple years and things like automated, AI/ML-powered high-throughput phenotyping are described as breakthrough technologies which will revolutionize agriculture and synthetic biology. More accurately they are relatively narrow-scoped tools which, while useful in many cases, are more often bandwagons people jump on for career progression.

"Several billion dollar companies could be spun up"

cries in John Deere Monopoly

I think the next ag revolution will be robotics capable of harvesting and maintaining intercropping/multicropping based ecosystems instead of periodic-raze monocultures. The results are better in terms of output per unit of land, and the industrial inputs are reduced in terms of pest control and fertilizer. However, the machinery needs to be much more complicated and agricultural processes will not be as fast.

There are several I know of right now, although they're each in very specific spaces. From weeding, to insect removal, to high value picking.