A robot to replace the need for farmers to go inside the grain bin

About 30 people a year are entrapped in grain bins. About half die. Generally, someone goes inside a grain bin only because something has gone wrong. Which is when it&#x27;s most dangerous.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agfax.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;grain-bins-sudden-death-4-ways-it-happens" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agfax.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;02&#x2F;18&#x2F;grain-bins-sudden-death-4-ways-...</a>

I&#x27;m kind of fascinated by how many comments in here are of the &quot;Gee, why use something so complicated? Why not just tie on a rope if you go in the silo?&quot; variety.<p>The inability to imagine that people who aren&#x27;t tech bros can and actually <i>do</i> sensible things to address problems they encounter--and that some of their problems might still be harder to solve than coding a signup form--is impressive.

Friendly reminder that people who deal with &quot;unsafe by office worker standards&quot; stuff day in and day out do not shovel money at you without critical thought just because you can portray your product as improving safety. These guys aren&#x27;t wringing their hands and clutching their pearls over the thought of a dangerous job. They&#x27;re finding a way to be careful and mitigate the risks of the worst outcomes and then getting the job done. To them it&#x27;s no different than trying not to land on your ass trying to pin an implement to the tractor in the mud. Going into a silo or grain hopper is not a dangerous task to them. It&#x27;s just a task and like any other task you should approach it in a smart manner if you want the best results. Selling something as a safety improvement isn&#x27;t that easy because the physics involved in bulk materials or heavy equipment are always going to hurt people who don&#x27;t work smart given enough exposure and likewise the ROI of removing any one type of exposure is low.<p>Now, if the machine can all but eliminate the need for the manual job they might sell a few. Because farmers love when shit just magically works because the day only has so many hours in it and one less someone has to stop what you&#x27;re doing to deal with.<p>On a more technical note, bulk dry goods can generally be persuaded to follow gravity if you give them a kick start with vibration. This approach has a bunch of pluses (the equipment is very reliable and typically you can resolve blockage by varying the frequency) but I don&#x27;t know why it isn&#x27;t used for grain (though it is used on the trucks and rail cars that transport grain). You typically see it in bulk material handling settings where you can&#x27;t afford to stop the line and&#x2F;or it&#x27;s too dangerous to make someone clear a blockage manually so I assume it&#x27;s a cost thing and farming margins aren&#x27;t big enough. It seems like these guys went and invented a robot that solves a problem that has an existing solution. But the article doesn&#x27;t mention why the existing solution doesn&#x27;t get used for grain and why the new robot will. I get that it&#x27;s a high level press release but I still wanna know.

Probably coincidence but I&#x27;ve noticed a ton of grain articles lately, here&#x27;s a trending on on reddit from today:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;todayilearned&#x2F;comments&#x2F;nwmect&#x2F;til_that_10s_of_farmers_die_each_year_from_grain&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;todayilearned&#x2F;comments&#x2F;nwmect&#x2F;til_t...</a>

This seems like another high tech solution looking for a problem. I&#x27;m not heavy agriculture savy but it seems to me the same could be solved by having 2 or 3 archimedes screws on the bin which could keep grain moving over time and preventing it from forming the clods.<p>The bot could also be radio controlled and it would still remove the need of a human going in.<p>Another pet peeve of mine is the robot-as-a-service part - can&#x27;t we just buy stuff and keep it anymore?

Whomever manages to sell a product called &quot;Grain Weevil&quot; to <i>farmers</i> must be unfathomably brilliant.

I would be kind of interested to know how many times the farmers need to go into the grain bin to rescue the robot.

Agriculture is an area still ripe for technological innovation. It looks less and less like it did a generation ago, but there are still many dangerous tasks, like this one, involved and, I believe, many that could be made much more efficient.<p>I love to see projects like this making a difference for people doing critical, and often dangerous, blue collar work.

Just saw an article on Reddit in how dangerous this is. Back in college I was being asked to develop a project to a rice factory, so I went there several times. In one occasion a worker fell in one of those grain bin and died a slowly death. Scary as heck.

Crazy that this work has been done by hand. I always assumed there would be an augur or something inside.

A farmer I knew had run the numbers on the cycle time for unloading grain wagons at harvest time; paying neighborhood kids $3&#x2F;hr (in 1982 or so) to dance on top of the grain as it drained paid off. There were bars to grab on the top of the wagons so it wasn&#x27;t <i>deeply</i> dangerous, but it certainly got exciting.<p>His kids were the ones driving the wagon trains from the fields to the silos. That was even more exciting. No insurance, just &quot;if you break it you have to help fix it&quot;

Here is a negative two cents idea: Attach a dumb auger drive &quot;robot&quot; to the end of tether adjustable from the top, with an umbilical to solar panels, maybe a lidar or sonar to see the shape of the field, make it go in spiral back and forth Roomba style. Eventually you&#x27;ll have run all over the grain multiple times. No need for fancy deep learning AI.

&gt; The Grain Weevil powered by JLI Robotics is a mobile robot that scurries across the top of the grain inside of a storage bin performing tasks that no human should ever do.<p>This felt like a particularly strong wording. Is it due to risk of drowning in grain? Or just an annoying task?

Met a couple a few years ago who’d recently lost their teenaged son tamping down a corn bin; still have nightmares about the details. This will be wonderful if it’s accessible to all farmers.

In Argentina, silos have been mostly replaced by silo bags with grain inside. Like this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agroverdad.com.ar&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;como-lograr-en-8-pasos-un-almacenamiento-en-silobolsa-seguro-y-eficiente" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;agroverdad.com.ar&#x2F;2019&#x2F;04&#x2F;como-lograr-en-8-pasos-un-...</a>

Once we can make bread with nothing but sunlight and robots humanity will be so much closer to being free from work.

If grain bins are dangerous to go inside, maybe there&#x27;s a low tech solution like safety lines attached to a belt similar to mountain climbing or high rise construction.

Can you make a big one I can drive around some sand dunes?