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.

Comments

Re:Cool now can hack for food and I don't care if

[bluefoxlucid]

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.