Agricultural Robot

Hello Readers!

Being from small town Iowa, the agricultural world surrounds me. While that may mean I cannot count how many times I have been stuck behind slow moving farm equipment while driving and that I went to a high school where there was a drive your tractor to school day, it also means that I have seen first hand the amount of hard work put into the agriculture business.

The technology and methods used in agriculture have been continuously improving.  In the late 18th century, people were innovative and developed oxen or horse powered wooden plows that by today’s standards would be considered primitive, but was very advanced at that time. In the 1930s, new and improved irrigation methods were developed along with conservation tillage. In the present, there has been advances in the robotics used in agriculture. All of this progress came about out of necessity. The oxen or horse powered wooden plows were invented to get more work done in less time and with less manpower in order to keep up with demand. The improved irrigation methods and conservation tillage came about because farmers needed to be less wasteful during and after the impact of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. The robotics in agriculture were developed for the same reason the animal powered wooden plows were, farmers needed a more efficient way to keep up with demand.

Some of the most common applications for the robots include: harvesting and picking, weed control, autonomous mowing, pruning, seeding, spraying, and thinning, phenotyping, sorting and packing, and utility platforms. Some robots are difficult to create because of how advanced they must be in order to make decisions like a person can. For instance, there are many variables in deciding if a vegetable is ripe enough to be picked, and while people can handle that quickly, it is harder to design a robot to do the same. It does not mean that this job cannot be fully automated, it just means that people have their work cut out for them to invent a bot that is fully capable.

With the growing demand, farmers need to be a hundred different places at once to keep up and with the agricultural bots they can. The following are 7 different applications of these bots which I read from Alex Owen-Hill’s article “Top 10 Robotic Application in the Agricultural Industry”.

1. Nursery automation: a bot(s) can take care of seeding, potting and warehousing living plants in greenhouses
2. Autonomous precision seeding: The bots can be faster, more efficient, and precise when seeding the fields, which can lead to higher yields. In order for this bot to know where to plant, it needs “geomapping,” which will tell the bot not only where to plant the seeds, but also the soil properties of the whole field so that the bot can make better decisions.
3. Crop monitoring bots: There are drones that farmers can use in order to view collected crop data, analyze it and make decisions. Similarly, there are ground bots that provide crop data that can provide more detailed data along with doing other jobs that are mentioned later.
4. Fertilizing and irrigation: traditionally both fertilization and irrigation methods had included spraying the whole field because there was not a way to quickly water or fertilize specific areas based upon need. The bots are able to do so, which will cut down on water, solve the problem of plants growing too quickly, and other inefficiency problems.
5. Crop weeding: Many people are worried about the herbicides being sprayed over plants and while it may get the job done, it is also wasteful. Similar to the fertilizing and irrigation bots, there is a bot that can use micro-spraying to spray the herbicide only on detected weeds. Or the bots have made the herbicide unnecessary because it can either uproot the detected weeds kill them off with lasers.
6. Autonomous Tractors: One type of autonomous tractor is a “follow-the-leader” tractor where the autonomous tractor will follow another tractor that is being driven by a person. Autonomous tractors will continue to be improved as the demand for them increases.
7. Milking: Cows need to be milked like clockwork and the whole processes is a lot of work. Therefore, robots were designed to do some of this work to help one person be able to do the work of many.

Where would we be without farmers? Most likely we would either not be surviving or how we survive would look completely different. Farmers provide us with the survival essential of food. Even though our population grows, our farmland does not grow accordingly. Therefore farmers are in need of being able to supply more without much change in resources. This is difficult for a person to do alone, which is why farming has taken a technological turn. If you are not use to farm life, I think you would be shocked to see how much technology is being used. There are even developments being made that do not involve robots, like the ability to grow meat. I am a little skeptical of that, but I think it is because I do not know much about it and the thought of it is different. I also wonder if people who are vegetarians or vegans became so due to the animal cruelty side to meat, would consume grown meat. Keep an eye on this ever changing industry, it may surprise you.

Links to References:

https://www.goldsteinresearch.com/report/global-agricultural-robots-market-outlook-2024-global-opportunity-and-demand-analysis-market-forecast-2016-2024

https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-american-agriculture-farm-machinery-4074385

https://www.robotics.org/blog-article.cfm/Robotics-in-Agriculture-Types-and-Applications/74

https://blog.robotiq.com/top-10-robotic-applications-in-the-agricultural-industry

https://www.engineering.com/Blogs/tabid/3207/ArticleID/13022/Are-Autonomous-Tractors-the-Future-of-Farming.aspx

Posted By: Lisa Christen