Lesson 1 - Robotics in the agricultural field Flashcards
How did agribots get started?
Research started 1920
Automatic guidance systems for vehicles
Led to harvesting robots in 1980
Followed by automation of other tasks like packaging, administrative duties
Agricultural robotics today
Similar services but vastly different agribots
Eg. crop farmer requires an agribot performing routine tasks like seeding, planting, harvesting while livestock farmer needs an agribot that can monitor the health of animals and herd on rough terrain
Planting & seeding
Xaver, system that controls a swarm of small robots for seeding
Monitoring & analyzing
SwagBot, monitors pastures & crops, fully autonomous with AI
Fertilization & irrigation
SmartCode, self-cleaning robot that collects soil samples
Crop weeding & spraying
R2Weed2, AI-based robot that weeds and analyses soil
Harvesting crops
Robion, detects, collects & packages strawberries & even predicts the next harvest
Automatic milking & manure cleaning
IDTechEX, does research on precision farming
Herding
“Mavic” and “Joe” can herd cattle and sheep over rough terrain
Exciting part of agribot evolution
Getting smaller & lighter
Smaller than a baseball
Performing more & more tasks
Can work together in swarms
Eg. task-specific drones
Future prospects of agricultural robotics
Main aim - automate as many tasks as possible
Farming automation removes expensive labour & improves distributions of resources avoiding waste
Concerns for agricultural robotics
High initial cost implementing
Increased skill level
Electricity shortage
