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Comment by Ancalagon | Hacker News Reader

Also I think maintenance of 1000 tiny drones is going to be a lot more difficult than that of one big tractor

This isn't intuitive to me. If one big tractor has a failure, the whole operation shuts down. If 1/1000 drones breaks, swap in a spare and move it to some kind (potentially automate-able) repair area. If the ideal number of drones is 1000 operationally, you just need to figure out how much of a margin of extra reserves you need to keep things operating. But even with a .1% lower capacity, you'd probably not notice anything, especially compared with 100% lower capacity.

I think the worry is that with 1,000 drones, if you have 10 breaking daily, that's probably a full-time job for someone to be repairing them, especially if they have to go out retrieving them.

One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.

I guess I don't really understand your assumptions. Why would 1 massive machine capable of doing all the various tasks of managing this farm require less maintenance than 1000 presumably much simpler, smaller machines? Assuming other things besides mobility break, I don't think retrieval would be much more of an issue, or that we'd have reason to expect the failure rate to be higher for each smaller, simpler drone than for the giant, super-complex one. To get the same work done, the behemoth would have to move much faster, have many more specialize tools and sensors all in the same rig, and would not be swappable for regular maintenance without pausing the entire workflow. Small drones could go back to base in shifts (again with some margin of extra drones) so that there are always 1000 actively working.

I did not assume the smaller drones would be simpler than the tractor. In fact I'd expect them to be similarly if not more complex.

More complex for sure. If you watched the video, there's still a tractor. And instead of a simple plastic tank, it hauls a shitton of electronics.

Now, the video is shot in a shiny nice weather day. Now imagine how would it perform if it's raining since last Tuesday.

To be clear: we were talking about a "food forest," not the kind of row-based farm tractor in the video. I certainly agree that the kind of tractor in the video is simpler than the swarm units would be. But a giant tractor that can navigate a forest is a different matter entirely, no?

On large scales, it's more like you have a hundred big tractors and if one of them breaks down the whole operation keeps going because there are 99 big tractors left. The question then becomes: how much maintenance do you have to do per ton of food produced? A swarm of small robots have a lot more parts than a large tractor that does the same amount of work.

There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is being done.

I guess it's true that the originally propose 1000 is an arbitrary number, and it would take some experimentation and work to figure out the ideal number of robots per acre to optimize whatever you care about most (yield, power consumption, maintenance costs being obvious contenders). But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of some size.

and there is the problem of having too much variety on crops and people wanting meat, basically…

farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far away… because some already give reports of what went wrong to the central

> But I think it's easy to say that literally one giant robot covering an entire edible forest is obviously going to be more inefficient and troublesome than a swarm of some size.

Yeah, nobody suggested that we have building size tractors so I don't know what you're arguing.

They were talking about "current farming machine sized ones" vs "a drone with some crap attached"

this is like the monolithic vs microservices debate and i love it

Imagine the difference between manually replacing 1 bearing or charging 1 battery and 1000.

The only reason you think it's easy is because you ignore the number and just imagine doing it once anyway.

I'd rather replace 10,000 AAA batteries than a single battery that's as big as 10,000 AAA batteries.

The one big battery is easier and faster - in large part because you can't lift that yourself so you have machines to do the work for you. For AAA you could design the same machine, but odds are you didn't.

Also the scaling isn't linear. A bus that transports 100 people doesn't burn nearly as much fuel as 100 scooters.

If I had to replace 10k batteries, I'd probably make (or buy) a machine for that too. However, even replacing 10k batteries by hand probably costs less in employee hours than a single one-off machine for either example.

(40 hours / 10,000 batteries = 14.4 seconds per battery; USA minimum wage = $7.25/h = $290 per 40h week, about the same as the cheapest hydraulic lift I saw on machinemart.co.uk at current exchange rates, but I'm not a mechanic so I don't know if that would be the right tool for the job anyway).

And of course, the same applies if we really had drone swarms — anything like this would be automated, up to and including full disassembly of damaged units so their parts could be reused for new units, e.g. https://youtu.be/pDZdnbI0MAc

Big tractor isn't more complex than smaller machines. It's just bigger. So you're essentially having 1000x the failure rate.

Big farm will also have more than one machine and the "downtime" will be mostly scheduled maintenance, very little chance of your equipment just deciding to not work today. In case of many smaller farms, well, you can ask the neighbour... from what I remember from living in small village with many farmers "harvest" was often few farms pooling their resources and doing all the fields together, instead of each doing their own.

Taking real life analogy of probably similar complexity scenario. Would you prefer to maintain 1 very big photo copier. Or 100 distributed desktop printers...

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