Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The average person, world wide, does little more than consume food and pursue sexual relations. Some take another route, consuming food and pursuing drug induced highs. Humanity isn't going to do anything more valuable with their time than they are already doing. In fact, picking produce would be a step up for a large number of Americans. Take a tour of your nearest housing project. I don't much care whether you live in a large city with ghettos, or if you live out here in Outback, Nowhere. Our county jail is overpopulated with good for nothings who haven't earned enough honest money in their lifetimes to pay for their incarceration.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br