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Satellite Driven Farming Equipment
ravenousbugblatter writes "An article at CNN discusses how Australian scientists are using GPS to automatically drive tractors and other farming equipment on predetermined tracks. The technology is encouraged because it can prevent water loss associated with the repeated compaction of soil from heavy farming equipment."
Couldn't the same thing be achived by simply not driving in the ruts?
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And your friends will be be able to sleep all day long, for they will no longer have jobs.
I was looking at this, and despite the funny jokes about a redneck skynet, and all hail the rise of the john deer overlords, I do have a couple serious questions.
In kansas a lot of the farmed land in the north western parts of kansas is non-uniform. People tend to have this idea of kansas as being a flat area, but the land is actually quite hilly in the western parts.
What happens if a tractor slips or loses traction? Or do the tractors simply not operate when it is muddy? How much error detection and fixiing do these tractors have. What happens if it finds itself on a part of a field it shouldnt be on, IE its transmitter goes out for a short period of time due to electrical disturbance (say freak lightning or something else).
Does the tractor drive across tilled land to get back to the spot (possibly destroying crops) or does it know to re-orient itself, drive along the right path, and then proceed about its task.
What happens if there is a hardware failure, is it possible to set a new tractor right where the last one set off, or does it need to go through the entire process again?
these things werent answered very well in the article, but are very obvious questions i think that should pop up to someone who read the article.
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I took a course in surveying a couple years ago at university; the US gov't has a masking signal they can apply to gps satellites to give purposely inaccurate data. It essentially changes the coordinate values by a random number, and the results can put you out by as much as 200 m. As soon as this signal was switched off, you were good to a mere couple meters. I don't, however, know how they're getting accuracy to less than an inch.
As great is this might be to farmers in australia, my question is how long will it take to automate my lawn care?
It's great fun to spend half a day getting drunk to ignore extream heat while mowing your lawn, but i'll bet people would buy lawnmowers that would do it for you.
This might also eliminate that neighbor that has the fortitude to wake up at 7:00 am on saturday to cut his lawn.
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Squirrel
I wonder how soon we'll see an automated lawnmower for ordinary yards and lawns. I've seen the vacuum cleaner that senses obstacles, allowing it to vacuum a room unattended. Seems like mowing a lawn wouldn't be too much different. Of course, you'd have to define boundaries, because, unlike an indoor room, there might not be solid walls at the edge of the lawn.
I for one welcome our new joke-of-the-month overlords!
(The Soviet Russia thing is passé for all the trolls now, I guess?)
I come from a long line of farming folk. I've farmed with my folks, they farm, their folks farmed with other farming folks....
Modern farming folks, armed with this system will need fewer folks around the farm. Fewer folks in the area means a smaller demand for services, so more folks will leave. Finally, fewer and fewer folks will fill the rural landscape.
Will this technology be the nail in the coffin of rural life in the midwestern states, requiring only a few folks to farm for everyone?
What happens to the rest of the folks in more populated states when the system crashes and there are too few farmers to farm fields the hard way?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Fortunately, Kangaroos are already equiped with a collision detection and avoidance subsystem sufficient for avoiding slow moving objects like farm implements.
Children and Pets, however may not be.
From the article i got the sense these were just modified regular tractors, not some lightwieght version that reduces compaction.
I invite you to go look at any farmer's (try my dad) row crops. The furrows on fields of row crops such as carrot seed and garlic are laser straight, and they travel the same furrows when working the field all season long. Growing up, Dad used to let me try to cultivate a row at the very edge of the field (where it was easy for him to fix) and it was always a disaster. However after years of doing it, my dad and many of the farmers in our area had it down to where you could look all the way down a 1/4 mile field and see only inches of deviation.
Furthermore, even if someone had some wandering furrows, it's just a matter of staying in them when doing work in the field as the crop grows (spraying, etc).
I can see a system that uses lighter machinery or allows few passes over a field in a season, but if we're talking about driving the same tractors by different methods, aside from the convenience, I don't see how it would yield the spectacular result quoted. Unless they were comparing their tractors to one driven by complete novices who wander all over the field (too much Fosters?)
You know what?
This seems very cool and everything but I wonder how "automatic" these are and do they have any collision detection. I can't help but picture the tractor going along, hitting a kangeroo and then all hell break loose.
And hitting a kangaroo is of course impossible with a human driver?
Even at Slashdot the demand for security in new technology seems to be 100%. The much more reasonable standard is to demand of new technology that it demands on par with humans. I bet a relatively simple motion detector could do the job of stopping if something unexpected shows up. At least to the point where they are as likely to stop as humans, which can perform relatively poorly when pulling long hours of monotonous work.
Tor
Why? Cars, trucks, trains, planes, boats don't.
Remember, these things operate on farm, somone's property, behind fences. Someplace where stray humans are not supposed to be.
Besides, serious farm equipment is big and noisy. If a person or an animal can't tell one is coming and get out of the way, they're already dead.
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I have to say I think this is a pretty good idea... but...
Farm machinery and computers just don't mix. It sounded like a great idea when they started to put computers into tractors, but it has been nothing but a nightmare to farmers. Wires get too warm and fry or make contact all the time under the hood blowing out chips, dirt gets into the electronics themselves and causes them to quit working. When this happens, can Mr. Farmer fix it? No, it is like a modern vehicle. Mr. Farmer usually has to pay some programmer from 300KMs away to drive down and fix a $5 computer chip. People have lost days due to down time and at a critical time in the year this can mean tens of thousands of dollars a day, not to mention the cost of getting someone to fix it out to the tractor. The cost and problems these computerized tractors have is why no farmer considers it, or if they do they soon realize their mistake and trade the sucker off quick.
Sounds like a great idea until these automated tractors start shutting down and then you start to see the real cost of this venture. Leave the driving to the farmer. Technology still can't compete against the flesh and blood farmer.