As the world population rises, providing sufficient food for all people requires increased agricultural production. Localized food shortages are a reality, but on the aggregate, humanity has responded to this challenge. We produce far more food than a century ago, with a fraction of the labor.
Farm robots are poised to further supplement and replace human labor, while smart agriculture allows for better usage of resources like land, water, and chemical additives. These are just a few of the robotic farming possibilities that are cutting edge now and could become commonplace in the near future.
Smart Agriculture Insights Via Drone
Even a decade ago, overhead aerial reconnaissance meant flying a manned aircraft over a field or obtaining satellite imagery, both of which are relatively expensive propositions. Today, automated drones can perform agricultural imaging, obtaining relevant and current insights. These drones can traverse fields autonomously via GPS, and even land by themselves for recharging or when the job is complete.
This type of near-real-time crop monitoring allows farmers to take action to quickly rectify failing crops. Another exciting use case is proactive monitoring of unplanted fields during the winter months, in order to calculate how much biomass is lost in different areas. This information can then be used to create a detailed fertilizer application map, increasing yields by 10% or more.
Autonomous Farming Robot Tractors
Traditionally, one tractor is driven by one person. With an advanced autopilot system, however, it’s possible for this one person to instead control multiple tractors remotely, acting as more of a manager than the machine’s pilot. Such a tractor would need to be programmed to perform a task, but sensors such as lidar, radar, vision systems, and the commensurate computing power to process these inputs can take care of the mundane navigation tasks that normally require a human’s attention.
Tractors can also use ground analysis cameras for real-time targeted pesticide application on to-be-planted areas. This saves on chemical costs as well as environmental impact, while still producing similar herbicidal results to a broad-based spraying pattern. While this appears to be a manned tractor application today, there’s no reason why such weed sensing/pesticide distribution couldn’t be integrated into an (even more) automated solution in the future.
Robotic Fruit Harvesting
While combines have dramatically lowered the labor involved in harvesting grain, automated fruit picking isn’t widely implemented today. Development on this task is ongoing, however, and picking robotics development has been in the works since at least the 1990s. Many of these designs use a fairly standard robot arm, custom end effectors, and vision sensors to identify and pick fruit. Visual identification could potentially make it possible to choose fruit at peak ripeness, but reaching out to a piece of fruits’ location and then actually pulling it off remains a challenge.
One interesting harvesting concept is the Tevel Aerobotics Technologies tethered drone platform. Rather than using a single robot arm, or even a group of arms, the Tevel system uses a series of drones tethered to a mobile base station, each with its own vacuum end effector. This setup allows the localized freedom of movement of a flying platform, without the typical drone recharging issues. Tevel plans to sell these machines and also offer harvesting automation as a service.
Vertical Indoor Farming
Typical factory automation is designed to minimize variability, taking the product-in-process through a pre-defined set of steps. Farming, however, is an inherently organic operation, subject to varying environmental conditions that can be difficult for a machine to handle. Robotic indoor farming aims to organize plant growth in such a way that all aspects of the organic lifecycle can be controlled. As an added benefit, pesticides are typically not needed, as the indoor environment can be kept bug-free.
The concept of vertical farming takes advantage of stacked “mini-plots” for plant growth, allowing areas of land to multiply upwards. An artificial light source is applied to each layer, and advanced watering/feeding systems such as hydroponics are used to provide nutrients to the roots. Such farms can potentially produce food close to, or even in, the urban area where it will be consumed, saving transportation costs.
One current example of this type of enterprise is Bowery Farming, with facilities in New Jersey and Maryland, near where the produce is consumed. Perhaps the grocery store of tomorrow will no longer have trucks that bring produce in the back dock, but instead simply move it to the storefront once it ripens in the attached robotic farming installation.
Automated Farming Robots with Human Leadership
While automation continues to advance, it’s safe to assume that humans will still be involved in farming in the future in some form. If nothing else, as Katie Morich of the Bowery’s New Jersey farming operation puts it, “It’ll be pretty lonely for the robots if they don’t have anybody to talk to.” Or to twist a Warren Bennis quote, “The [farm] of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.”
Perhaps it’s not the traditional role of a farmer and his dog, but as the world’s population grows, we’ll need even smarter and more efficient food production. Between efficiency gains and the potential elimination of transportation costs, (even more) automated farming techniques may provide our food in the future.
