I remember reading a piece about farmers using drones, and I must say I was impressed. For farmers, the transition from manned aircraft to drones is an easy choice to make. Not only are they much cheaper, but they also provide imaging tools, which can be used for detecting a variety of crop-related issues, ranging from problems with irrigation to measuring chlorophyll levels in plants. So today I want to talk about the next step in agri-tech evolution: robots. Although most modern farmers don’t have to spend their days in the field anymore, sweating and toiling under the sun while harvesting crops or tending to cattle, they still spend a considerable amount of time servicing machines that harvest and spray for them. If this part of the production were automated, farmers would have more time (and money) to invest in expanding and perfecting their production capacities. They’d also boost yields in the process. If you think using robots in agriculture is too futuristic, think again: They are already assisting with a growing number of back-breaking activities in fields all over the world. For instance, meet SW 6010, the strawberry harvester, made by Spanish company Agrobot: The way it works is pretty cool. The robot lowers dozens of rows of camera-equipped appendages into the strawberry bed, which shoot around 20 photos per second, scanning fruits. Once a ripe strawberry has been found, the robot picks it. The strawberry is then placed onto a conveyor belt and taken up to be placed in a container. The entire process takes just four seconds. Not everything is fully automated, though. The only part left for humans, due to the delicate structure of the fruit, is to pack them into containers by hand. Anyway, can you guess what this one does? It’s called “Rosphere,” and it is another robot made in Spain, this time by the Robotics and Cybernetics Research Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. This hamster ball look-alike is built for collecting data on soil composition, temperature, moisture and plant health. Collected data is transmitted to the farmer via Wi-Fi. It easily navigates uneven terrain, but in case the robot gets stuck, a farmer can simply take over and steer it manually. This next machine is called Aquarius, the greenhouse-watering robot. It’s armed with a set of wheels and 30 gallons of water. This robot uses sensors to detect levels of moisture in the soil, allowing it to calculate how much water a particular plant needs. Aquarius can be programmed to use the same amount of water, regardless of the sensory data. Those two modes, called “proportional” and “fixed,” can be combined, providing varying amounts of moisture for different sets of pots along its route. It can also operate between different rooms, open and close doors, as well as perform autonomous refill/recharge functions. It’s made by David Dorhout, an Iowa State University grad who now works at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. Another one of Dorhout’s creations is Prospero, the robot farmer. What makes Prospero unique is that it is a member of a robot swarm, which consists of hundreds, or even thousands, of other units. Together they function as one entity, determining where to plant each seed, as well as which plant to tend to and which to harvest. Tending and harvesting functions are still in development, and only the seed planting has been implemented so far. A fully functional planting prototype is capable of moving in any direction on uneven ground in an effort to find the optimal location for planting each seed. Once it finds an empty spot, it will drill a hole at an optimal depth and then plant the seed, along with fertilizers or herbicides. After the seed has been planted and covered with soil, Prospero will apply the marking agent, which will then be used to alert other planter bots that this location has already been used. This goes one step further: an almost fully automated lettuce farm, where robots handle every step of the plant-handling process. It’s in Japan (of course). This autonomous farm will open in mid-2017 in Kameoka, Kyoto Prefecture. The company behind the undertaking, Spread, says it will boost lettuce production from 21,000 to 50,000 heads a day. The long-term goal is much more ambitious: The company plans to raise that number by 10-fold within five years. “The seeds will still be planted by humans, but every other step, from the transplanting of young seedlings to larger spaces as they grow, to harvesting will be done automatically,” said JJ Price, Spread’s global marketing manager, in The Guardian. Do you think the automation of agriculture is necessary to provide food as the Earth’s population booms, or will it cause even more hunger and poverty by making cheap human labor obsolete? Let me know in the comment section.
Spanish company Agrobot’s SW their days is used to detect and pick ripe strawberries. Taking just 4 seconds for the machines to then put the strawberries on a conveyor belt, fruits are then packaged into containers by hand. Aquarius, made by David Dorhout at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a greenhouse-watering robot that can carry up to 30 gallons of water and uses sensors to detect levels of moisture in soil to calculate how much water a given plant needs. Prospero, a specialist seed-planting robot, is another of Dorhout’s robots.