A robot to replace the need for farmers to go inside the grain bin
Friendly reminder that people who deal with "unsafe by office worker standards" 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't wringing their hands and clutching their pearls over the thought of a dangerous job.  They're finding a way to be careful and mitigate the risks of the worst outcomes and then getting the job done.  To them it'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'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't that easy because the physics involved in bulk materials or heavy equipment are always going to hurt people who don'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'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't know why it isn'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't afford to stop the line and/or it's too dangerous to make someone clear a blockage manually so I assume it's a cost thing and farming margins aren'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't mention why the existing solution doesn't get used for grain and why the new robot will.  I get that it's a high level press release but I still wanna know.