Robots for agriculture

Villagers, farmers and kolkhoz farmers each year are forced to perform a mass of routine actions in tillage, planting, weeding and harvesting. Many actions are quite primitive and repeatable, that is, ideal for automation. It seems that the villagers didn’t have much time to rub the corns: several European and American firms started producing small robots capable of performing a significant part of the agricultural work.

For example, the Massachusetts startup Harvest Automation began testing a robot on gyros, which can very quickly transfer pots or buckets of any size, carefully placing them into rows at a distance from each other (see video ). This is the main occupation of the workers in the nursery - farm, which specializes in growing young plants for transplantation. Their job is to bring a huge number of pots / buckets at the beginning of the season, arrange them, and at the end of the season collect and load them into vehicles that bring the goods for sale.

Now testing of Harvest Automation model in 11 breeding grounds in the US is ending, and sales will begin at the end of this year or the beginning of next year. Unlike analogs, the device is not equipped with a GPS system and is relatively cheap: the cost will be from $ 25K to $ 50K.
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The ideological brother of such compact robots is the home iRobot Roomba. It is also small and cheap and works on the same principle: it makes decisions on the situation, constantly analyzing the environment with the help of sensors. No wonder that co-founder and technical director of Harvest Automation startup is Joe Jones , the first employee of iRobot and inventor of the Roomba robot vacuum cleaner, which has already sold more than 3 million units around the world.

Harvest Automation model is very easy to maintain: you just need to put it “face” to the pots, press one button on the touchscreen (work object), and then indicate the distance to which the loads should be carried.

Working 24 hours a day, the robot replaces a dozen people, so the first customers who ordered Harvest Automation model expect to pay it back in a year or two, saving on seasonal workers.

There are other specialized robots. For example, the robot of the Spanish company AgroBot copes with the collection of strawberries.


^Agrobot

This is a very laborious process, and farmers had to hire a lot of temporary labor (usually migrant workers) to harvest. AgroBot works better and does not require a salary.



English company CMW Horticulture Ltd. sells a robot for processing plants with pesticides.



Perhaps, in the future, only intellectual work will remain for the villager: the choice of suitable crops for planting (based on the chemical analysis of the soil of the mobile robot agronomist and recommendations of the computer system), and the robots will do the rest.

via Wired