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