Will Artificial Intelligence Transform How We Grow and Consume Food? [Video] Today, agriculture is more efficient than ever, but it's also more dependent on environmental, technological, and social issues like never before.
Climate change, drought and other disasters, shifting energy landscapes, population growth, urbanization, GMOs, changes in the workforce, automation — these are just a handful of the factors that affect the global access to food. We'd all like to see a future in which people worldwide have a sufficient amount of safe and nutritious food to help them maintain healthy and active lives. Is this realistic in our lifetimes? To borrow a phrase, artificial intelligence is eating the world, and it can help move us closer to this future of abundant food.
Google science fair: Le robot jardinier made in France d'Eliott Sarrey va-t-il remporter le concours? SCIENCE - Le grand jour approche pour Eliott Sarrey.
How a Robot in the Garden Might Save a Trip to Whole Foods. This summer, I started wondering what you might do to build a small farming robot to manage a home garden.
I then discovered the interesting FarmBot project, which has been working on this for much longer, and has done much of what I thought might be useful. So I offer kudos to them, but thought it might be worth discussing some of the reasons why this is interesting, and a few new ideas. The rough idea is to use robotics to manage a modest garden. FarmBot. Open-Source CNC Farming. ZERA Food Recycler. Robotic weeders: to a farm near you? The future of weeding is here, and it comes in the form of a robot.
The growing popularity of robotic weeders for specialty crops has grown partly out of necessity, says Steven Fennimore, an extension specialist at the University of California, Davis. Specialty crops are vegetables like lettuce, broccoli, tomatoes, and onions. They are not mass-produced like corn, soybeans, and wheat. The need for robotic weeders stems from two issues. One is a lack of herbicides available for use in specialty crops. Hand-weeding is slow and increasingly expensive: it can cost $150-$300 per acre. "I've been working with robotic weeders for about 10 years now, and the technology is really just starting to come into commercial use," Fennimore says. Fennimore works with university scientists and companies to engineer and test the weeders. The weeders are programmed to recognize a pattern and can tell the difference between a plant and the soil. Explore further: Intra-row weeding possible with vision systems.
A robotic greenhouse capable to operate automatically in the Arctic. Researchers from Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) are implementing a large-scale interdisciplinary project on developing and constructing an innovative autonomous greenhouse.
For its operation, the University's advanced technologies will be applied such as phytotrons, ceramic emitters, spectroscopic studies, automated control systems and others. The project is supervised by Dr. Damir Valiev, the assistant at the Division of Materials Science of the TPU School of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies. This sun-chasing robot looks after the plant on its head. Robots Won’t Just Harvest Our Foods, They May Help Save Them. ‘We'll have space bots with lasers, killing plants’: the rise of the robot farmer. In a quiet corner of rural Hampshire, a robot called Rachel is pootling around an overgrown field.
With bright orange casing and a smartphone clipped to her back end, she looks like a cross between an expensive toy and the kind of rover used on space missions. Up close, she has four USB ports, a disc-like GPS receiver, and the nuts and bolts of a system called Lidar, which enables her to orient herself using laser beams. She cost around £2,000 to make. Every three seconds, Rachel takes a closeup photograph of the plants and soil around her, which will build into a forensic map of the field and the wider farm beyond. After 20 minutes or so of this, she is momentarily disturbed by two of the farm’s dogs, unsure what to make of her. Watching her progress from a corner of the field are three people from the Small Robot Company, and the farmer who co-owns the land. What does he make of Rachel? There could be equally big environmental gains. He cracks an awkward smile. Automated farm in England grows barley crop - CNN.
From sowing the seeds to picking the grain, human workers were replaced with automated machines operated from a control room.
The project, called Hands Free Hectare, was completed last month with a yield of 4 1/2 tons of barley, according to news releases. The automated farm was a joint venture by Harper Adams University in Shropshire, England, and Precision Decisions, a farming specialist company in York. "Previously, people have automated sections of agricultural systems, but funding and interest generally only goes towards one single area," said Kit Franklin, an agricultural engineer on the project.
Experts agree that automation technology has been available for some time now, but in recent years its implementation has been accelerated by decreasing costs and changing demographics in the workforce. Harbinger of what's possible However, there are limitations still to be assessed. There are also social and country-specific considerations.
Skill set shift.