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Robot Ranchers Monitor Animals On Giant Australian Farms (newscientist.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Sheep and cattle farms in the Australian outback are vast as well as remote. For example, the country's most isolated cattle station, Suplejack Downs in the Northern Territory, extends across 4000 square kilometres and takes 13 hours to reach by car from the nearest major town, Alice Springs. But robots are coming to the rescue. A two-year trial, which starts next month, will train a 'farmbot' to herd livestock, keep an eye on their health, and check they have enough pasture to graze on. Sick and injured animals will be identified using thermal and vision sensors that detect changes in body temperature and walking gait, says Salah Sukkarieh of the University of Sydney, who will carry out the trial on several farms in central New South Wales. The robot, which has not yet been named, is a more sophisticated version of an earlier model, Shrimp, which was designed to herd groups of 20 to 150 dairy cows.
Answered at last - No, but they do herd them.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Why we need to farm Giant Australians.
It doesn't even seem like a very good idea...
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
You're welcome.
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1. Scorched baron earth
2. the seemingly endless absence of humanity
3. Robots everywhere, watching, roaming with cold dead gaze...
Terminator 2 was filmed on a farm in Australia.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It seems like some scientists tried this a couple of years ago on Shetland Island in Europe. It actually worked quite well but they couldn't justify the initial expense over the cost of paying human laborers. You can read about the project here. Pretty neat, and it might work well if they can get the costs down.
Sick and injured humans will be identified using thermal and vision sensors that detect changes in body temperature
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Bystander: "Hey android! Do you herd sheep?"
Android: "That's incorrect, it should be "Have you heard sheep.""
and some feelings...
Otherwise, who else is going to sing about sheep fucking?
Cool now can hack for food when put out of work and I don't care if I caught as then the state will have to feed me + give me an room + a doctor.
Rawhide!
Yyyaah! SNAP!
Isn't it terrible? Since 1790, we've unemployed 82% of the workforce. Looking at the history of American agriculture, 90% of the labor force was farmers in 1790; by 1850, evil technical progress developing new farm techniques and diesel hardware dropped that to only 58%. In 1900, just 38% of Americans still had good, wholesome farm jobs; and by 1950 it was a staggeringly-low 12.2%. By 2000, farm workers only made up 1.9% of America's workforce, and today it's even lower.
Is it any wonder we now suffer from unemployment as high as 95% in many areas, with a national unemployment rate of 82% among the labor force? Only 41 million Americans have jobs, and their taxes support 300 million Americans on welfare. Our economy has collapsed due to the constant reduction of the workforce as farm jobs have been eliminated by newer technology, disenfranchising the worker with a long and constant stream of lay-offs.
But hey, at least the few of us with jobs are rich fat cats. Rather than spending 43% of the household money on food as in 1900, we only spent 30% in 1950, and 13% in 2000; today we spend under 11.5% of our income on food, and the rich among us can have things like smart phones and XBox video game consoles. Too bad about 89% of Americans being homeless and jobless and hungry.
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Git along lil' doggie.
You have 30 seconds to comply.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Fuck Australia.
Even their sissy short-pantsed football players are deadly.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.a...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Robot cow tipping.
Cool now can hack for food when put out of work
You were never going to have this job anyway. It's much tougher than most of what people put up with, and that includes sewer workers and IT helpdesk positions.
82% unemployment rate? Only 41 million Americans employed? What stats are you looking at? According to the ones I'm looking at, there was an unemployment rate of 5% in April 2016 (Source). Stretching those stats as far back and they'll go, the highest the unemployment rate hit was 10.8% (around 1983). Another page from the same website shows 151 million people employed (Source). The lowest number of employed people since 1950 was still over 57 million.
So just how are you assuming that only 41 million Americans have jobs and 300 million Americans are on welfare? (Note that you can't count children as "unemployed Americans on welfare" since they aren't part of the job force.) Or are you assuming that anyone who isn't working in a farm job must be somehow "unemployed"?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Ctrl-Alt-Del.
Have gnu, will travel.
Tomorrow people.
Sick and injured humans will be identified using thermal and vision sensors that detect changes in body temperature
Since the SARS outbreak back in early 2002, they already do this in airports... Why not animals?
Why would a farm need animals? How barbarian.
The future is computer-controlled, plant-based farming. Grow local, from anywhere.
82% unemployment rate? Only 41 million Americans employed? What stats are you looking at?
GPP was suggesting that replacing some jobs with robots would lead to a world of unemployment as all our jobs go away. I did the math starting at 1790 with all the jobs that went away, instead of looking at the real world. Problem?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I think that is the sound you are looking for...
So, it's either -
Woosh!
Or I have been trolled.
It's hard to tell these days.
"The best part? I became an ordained minister while not wearing pants." -- CleverNickName
when the animals are under attack? Launch a drone sortie to take out the interlopers? What about a lone dingo attempting to take out a calf or other newborn animal?
I hereby offer my services as Outback Rifleman. I'll take $50K Australian, all the cold beer I can drink, and steal, lamb, or shrimp on the barbie nightly. I'll sleep on the porch in a hammock during the summer and inside during the Winter. For transport around the ranch, I'll take a helicopter for distant runs and a Yamaha dirt bike for the shorter runs.
How boring. If at least it would have been drones with cattle-prods...then it would have been news for nerds instead of tools for cowboys.
Did you think up eating meat for yourself? What about sucking milk from the udders of a cow? Would you do that every day, after killing the calf (who the milk is actually for)?
there are already at least two different robots dubbed "farmbot" so in the /. fashion, i dub this robot YARNFB (Yet Another Robot Named FarmBot)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
So we have bots herding mammals with the purpose of producing meat? Do they get to wear shock weapons if the mammals suddenly attack?
Well, fuck it. I for one welcome our new herding robotic overlords!
They gave it a mouth!!!
Wouldn't it be cheaper to put radio collars on all the animals? Most if not all the described functions could be done that way.
about 75 years of mass unemployment following the industrial revolution. It took decades for technology to catch up and create jobs. In the meantime you had poverty and inequlity of a scale that's hard to imagine. That's sorta the problem. You can't imagine it so you don't believe it'll happen.
So yeah, it's gonna suck when A.I.s and expert systems put another 89% out of work. Your grandkids grandkids will probably be posting the same crap to whatever replaces slashdot in 100 years. In the meantime you and I are in for a rough ride...
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They make cattle ranches look lovely, with beautiful green grass. Australian cattle ranches don't look like that..... at all.
They look like this - http://www.beefcentral.com/wp-...
Now where have i heard about robot cowboys before? Oh yeah, it was here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...
I am not a number - I am a free man!