Startup Testing Mobile Farmbots

An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports on Harvest Automation, a Massachusetts company developing small robots that can perform basic agricultural labor. The ones currently being tested in greenhouses and plant nurseries are 'knee-high, wheeled machines.' 'Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what's around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Key to making the robots flexible and cost-effective is designing them to work only with information provided by their sensors. They don't construct a global map of their environment, and they don't use GPS. The robots have sensors that detect boundary markers, a laser range finder to detect objects in front of them, and a gyroscope for navigating by dead reckoning. The robots determine how far they've traveled by keeping track of wheel rotations.'"

Comments

This is obviously the future

[Dr. Spork]

The efficiency of farming (yield value per area+inputs) is going to have to grow a lot as global population increases and gets richer. This is obviously one step in that direction. Sure, this robot is laughably primitive compared to Google's self-driving car, but future generations will do better. I think that in 20 years, we'll be able to intersperse multiple simultaneous crops in the same field, which is good for the soil, reduces the need for fertilizer and pesticide, and generates a more value.

The most important reason why we don't see this sort of farming on a large scale is because it requires much more fine-motor work and is incompatible with the machines we use today. But once those machines get substantially cheaper and more dexterous than people, I think we'll make this transition. Our food will be better for it, and there will be more of it. I don't think that this is very far off in the future.

Re:This is obviously the future

[DigiShaman]

I'm a bit concerned about all of this advancement to support extended population growth. My gut feeling is that we are just setting up ourselves for a big fall the more we detach ourselves from nature. Like a house of cards. It can only go so high before the entire system collapses. It's just a matter of when. For example, a high-altitude nuclear warhead my never cause bodily harm. But the EMP it releases is enough to shutdown entire nations with all microchips fried. That means no transportation and running water. Within weeks, people start dieing and bodies decomposing where they last crawled for survival. Truly scary stuff.