CIO Network: 3D Robotics CEO Chris Anderson Explains How Aerial Drones Will Revolutionize Farming. * Future of Farming. Robots set to transform agriculture. With reported agricultural labour shortages all over the world and demographics showing the average age of farmers steadily climbing, complacency about the security of our food production isn’t an option, the delegates to the European Robotics Forum 2012 were told.
In tandem with this future uncertainty, in the Developed World at least, there are growing concerns about product quality and safety, as well as the environmental impact of agriculture. "Until now, thanks to a reliance on large scale, mechanised agriculture combined with cheap labour in emerging economies, the routine deployment of robotics has been confined to a small number of specific tasks, such as milking, feed distribution and farm cleaning", explained Prof. Simon Blackmore, head of Engineering at Harper Adams University College. Robot researchers found that the combination of human hand eye co-ordination, dextrous manipulation and advanced object recognition was desirable, but simply too challenging.
Down on the Farm, Will Robots Replace Immigrant Labor? A quick search of Google Scholar will reveal that the engineering literature is home to more papers on agricultural robots than ever.
The majority are from China, which might seem strange given the historically low cost of labor there. But times are changing: Foxconn, the electronics manufacturer famous for building Apple products as well as worker suicide, is moving to incorporate one million robots into its assembly lines in just three years. Wages are rising in China, as are the demands of workers. In an age in which increasingly complex tasks can be performed by semi-autonomous machines, robots have become the ultimate scabs.
Down on the farm, it’s no different. The same technology that allows for self-driving cars is driving this nascent revolution. In one particular application, the FroboBox drove an experimental ASuBot, which is kind of like a self-driving riding lawnmower. Robots on the Farm. - Autonomous agricultural robots that could identify, spray and pick individual fruits and vegetables may soon be a reality. - New research focuses on the "brains" of the computers, teaching them to see and learn like human brains do. - The work could help advance other fields, too, including robotic surgery and other medical applications.
Commercial farms of the future may be staffed by robots that will identify, spray and pick individual pieces of produce from plants, even when their targets are grapes, peppers and apples that are as green as the leaves that surround them. As scientists in Israel and Europe get closer to this goal, experts say the work has a number of potential benefits. Autonomous agricultural robots could protect human workers from the harmful effects of handling chemicals by hand. Robots could also offer a timely supply of labor in many places, where there simply aren't enough itinerant workers available at the right times in the harvesting cycle. Robotic Farming. Earlier this year we told you about a neat project called Prosperso by David Dorhout.
Prospero is the first phase of a robotic swarm project to grow and harvest food. Prospero is controlled using a Parallax Propeller chip and 2 Ping sensors to help it avoid objects. Well, the project has progressed and in the video below it explains how man is the limiting factor in food production. It is very costly to have humans grow food and someday the planet’s population will outpace our ability to grow enough food. More about the overall concept is also explained, including the 4 steps involved. David’s website explains the concept: Prospero is the working prototype of an Autonomous Micro Planter (AMP) that uses a combination of swarm and game theory and is the first of four steps.
I’m not sure if I like the idea of robots involved in our food supply chain, but this is a really neat project. Agricultural robots: Fields of automation. ICT-AGRI Homepage. * Field Robot Event Website. Welcome to agricultural robots in Wageningen. Wageningen UR Glastuinbouw - Wageningen UR. Robots voor de veeteelt. NREC Markets.