![]() Ideally, the bot would scour rows and rows of strawberry plants indoors. Octinion has already commercialized the robot, which is being used in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. The Rubion bot uses a special vision system to detect when a berry is ripe and then plucks it with a soft 3D-printed hand. So, of course, a robot that can pluck berries continuously has appeal. Typically, as Nell Lewis reports for CNN, a farmer can hire workers to clear the field once, leaving any fruit that became ripe before or after that time to rot on the fields. Strawberry plants continue producing berries throughout the growing season, but currently, there aren’t enough workers to continually pick every berry that every plant produces. The traditional view of robots is that they’re clumsy and bulky-certainly not nimble enough to gently pluck a strawberry off its stem, right? However, that’s exactly what Belgian company Octinion’s Rubion robot can do. ![]() The Octinion Rubion scours rows and rows of strawberry plants indoors. Here are just five different types of robotics in development or already hard at work in fields. In this agricultural revolution, there are plenty of mind-blowing devices to awe and excite. “It empowers the farmers to take back ownership of their own technology.” “It gives them the permission to be creative, the ability to be creative with their equipment,” says Berg. Today’s farmers face lots of challenges: an aging workforce, a shortage of low-cost labor, environmental hazards and climate change, to name only a few, notes Jordan Berg, a National Science Foundation program director for their Future of Work initiative, which supports research “at the intersection of future work, technology, and workers.” And for every problem there seems to be a robot or robotic device in the works to fix it. It might not seem immediately intuitive, given the Old McDonald stereotypes people grow up with, but one major area of tech that stands to be highly influential in bringing precision farming to life is robotics. “The notion of farmers wearing denim overalls with a straw in their mouth is dead.” “The future of farming is becoming more sophisticated,” says Peter Liebhold, a curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum for American History. Most machines can be programmed to use machine-learning for example, fertilizer application equipment can be trained to “see” a field and only spray plants that need a boost, saving farmers product and money. Cow tags can be linked to GPS or even “Fitbit-like” devices to track their vitals remotely. For example, Wifi-enabled moisture sensors can help farmers conserve water by only watering parts of the field that need it most. The internet of things era means just about anything in our lives can be linked to a WiFi connection and the same applies for farming. ![]() Things like drones that communicate with satellites to collect data while soaring over a field. But with the complex data collecting devices of today’s world, agriculture is in the midst of a high-tech revolution-particularly in the area of precision farming.įarmers can use the same “big data” tools that are integrated into other industries. Farmers have always been diligent data collectors, knowing approximately what each acreage yields or how much milk an individual cow produces.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |