Slashdot Mirror
MIT and the Constant Robotic Gardeners
Singularity Hub writes "MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is pioneering the field of automated farming. During a semester-long experiment, CSAIL's researchers created a laboratory farm: tomato plants in terra cotta pots with artificial turf for grass. The goal of the experiment: to see if these tomatoes could be grown, tended, and harvested by robot caretakers."
Tomatoes are easy to grow, and by choosing a variety optimized for flavor rather than yield or disease resistance (not a major concern in low density farming) you can grow tomatoes better than anything you can buy. Once you've tasted a home grown tomato fresh from the vine you'll understand why tomato growing is popular.
Uh, the actual reason is that the laborers just drop trou and let loose in the field.
For those of you old enough to remember Huey and Duey the robots in the movie Silent Running: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/
-- IV
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
Kudos for MIT for working on this problem.
But "pioneering" it? Give me a break. Agricultural robotics ("agrobots") has been a going field for decades. The devices are very capable and some are quite inexpensive - to the point that there is at least one organic farm I know about that doesn't use or need the price breaks from exploiting foreign and/or illegal workers to run at a solid profit, despite pressure from the local authorities to hire illegals.
Look at The Mitchell Farm just for starters. (NOT the one I characterized above, by the way.) There are others using various levels of automation in Oregon, California, etc. And those are just places I KNOW about.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, Silent Running.
http://michaelsmith.id.au