Interesting dive into actual academic research into crochet machines:
"Why Aren't We Using Crochet Machines?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYzU-I7xK34
What I took away from this is that one of the fundamental differences between knitting and crochet is that because knitting stitches are held open, that makes it possible for them to be held open in a rigid structure, which thus enables a machine to insert the yarn in the right spot, because it is always at a fixed position. Crochet, on the other hand, works with closed stitches in a non-rigid structure, which means that the location of yarn-insertion is *not* in a fixed spot: it is necessary to pinpoint the hook-insertion location for each separate stitch. Humans find this trivial; machines do not.
