Instead of worrying so much about robots taking away jobs, maybe we should worry more about wages being too low for robots to even get a chance. Seasonal labor for harvesting agricultural products, particularly fruits and vegetables, is dependent on human labor from a diminishing universe of willing workers.

Robots that can supplement or replace human workers in the harvesting process are being developed and tested in startups and academia, but almost all are not yet ready for prime time.

In a NY Times article written by Neil Irwin entitled Rethinking Low Productivity, productivity growth has been on a downward path since the Financial Crisis. Irwin, who writes about economic trends, asks whether the downward trend is the cause of low growth, or the result, a troubling question in the dynamics of the agriculture industry.

“Inventors and business innovators are always developing better ways to do things, but it takes a labor shortage and high wages to coax firms to deploy the investment it takes to actually put those innovations into widespread use.”

Those two phenomena are happening today in the U.S. agricultural industry. Labor rates are rising while willing laborers are diminishing — yet farmers are not yet investing in robotics. In fact, they are accommodating to the labor crisis by planting less and changing the crops they grow to be less labor intensive.

J.W. Mason, the author of a paper by the Roosevelt Institute cited as the basis for the thesis of Irwin’s article, says:

“If the labor market tightens and wages rise, that will be the impetus to get companies to consider more big-ticket innovations that generate productivity growth so that we don’t perpetuate the present conundrum in which both arguments cannot be true:

“On Mondays and Wednesdays, economists argue that wages are low because robots are taking people’s jobs.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, it’s that we can’t have wages rise because productivity growth is low.”

This situation cannot continue without radical changes else we will become buyers of foreign fruits and vegetables paying prices set by foreign providers and dependent on them for availability and quality.

A number of factors are causing a reset in the ag industry in addition to the declining availability of farm workers: the challenges and complexities of employing and retaining farm labor; the rising cost of farm workers; changing farmlands; climate change; the growth of indoor farming; and the broader automation of the agriculture industry. All are propelling farmers to make changes in how they farm (or change downward the product mix they farm (which is often a path toward failure)). Market challenges for the sector include unclear value propositions, limited awareness of robotic systems among growers, insufficient robotic solutions, the difficulty of matching human-like dexterity with machines, fragmented technology development, and weak support.

Tractica, in their report on agricultural robotics, forecast an optimistic resolution to this temporary conundrum in the very near term and that that shipments of agricultural robots will increase significantly in the years ahead, rising from 32,000 units in 2016 to 594,000 units annually by 2024, by which time the market is expected to reach $74 billion in annual revenue. Certainly the time is ripe and, like Mason said, “Both arguments can’t be true.”

Source: Nesta.org, Precision Agriculture

Why are so many farm equipment manufacturers so heavily involved in the ag industry yet things are going so slowly in relation to robotics? Perhaps farmers need to first incorporate the digital era — and the concepts and practices of precision agriculture — before taking the next step toward the use of robots.

Two traditional qualifiers for farmers buying new equipment are flexibility and return on investment. Precision agriculture isn’t just rhetoric; it’s real-time intelligence flowing into analytics software that transforms that flow into meaningful, practical information that farm managers can react to quickly. That data — and that process — have costs and, for the last few years, farmers have been stretched because commodity prices are down. But changes effecting labor, water, commodity prices and politics are speeding up the need for significant automation in the already heavily automated agriculture industry while technological improvements are speeding up, particularly in the areas of vision systems, perception and grasping.

Consider these four key providers:

John Deere Corporation (NYSE:DE)

Deere is a global provider of tractors and farm implements, has a small line of autonomous “mules” and other robotic vehicles mostly for the military, as well as robotic lawnmowers for the consumer market. Deere has built an autonomous cab-less tractor, but it hasn’t been accepted by farmers who prefer their air-conditioned cabs and mobile control consoles. Nevertheless, 60% of Deere tractors come equipped with self-steering kits. Deere’s recent marketing push is in variable-rate towed or pulled farm implements.

Deere saw 2016 sales drop 8% from 2015 (which was also a down year). They attribute the slump to lower equipment sales resulting from difficult conditions in the farm (90%) and construction equipment (10%) markets. As a result, Deere sales of large ag equipment have dropped over 50% in the last 3 years.

From Deere’s Annual Report:

Equipment continues to get larger and more powerful, but its value is increasingly being determined by its technology and advanced capabilities. That’s why Deere is committed to becoming the industry’s undisputed leader in precision agriculture.

Today, customers can monitor and measure crop yield, moisture content, or seeding population in real time as their machinery moves along in the field. This data can be used to generate prescriptions for planting seeds and applying fertilizer or pesticide with more accuracy. That helps farmers manage costs and increase their revenue through improved productivity and higher yields. The results can be pretty impressive.

Trimble (NASDAQ:TRMB)

Trimble is a large provider of GPS technology for field and mobile workers in all disciplines. Their ag division integrates, provides, and sells a wide range of driverless-steering kits, prescription mapping systems, in-field guidance software and devices, and also sells various types of drones, GPS/RTK services and communication equipment, spot spray systems, a wide range of sensors and their Connected Farm Management System.

Trimble’s 2016 sales grew only 3% year-over-year. Ag revenue can’t be separately identified because of the way they report their income, however, Trimble’s navigational guidance products for all brands of ag equipment are their primary revenue along with their new, consolidated, precision ag software platform called their Connected Farm Management System, and their drone data collection system.

Trimble resells through CNH dealers as well as their own staff and has multiple ag-related products in addition to those mentioned above including speciality software and sensors for leveling and variable-rate watering applications.

Raven Industries (NASDAQ:RAVN)

Raven is a provider of engineered films such as those used in agriculture as plastic sheeting and silage covers, and components and software for RTK communication, steering and guidance. Raven also makes components for variable-rate dispensing devices such as nozzles for sprayers and controllers for multiple nozzles on a sprayer arm.

Raven’s 2016 sales grew 7.8% over 2015 revenue which was down -34% from 2014. Agricultural products represent approximately 38% of Raven’s revenues.

CNH (Case New Holland Industrial) (NYSE:CNH)

CNH Industrial is a global conglomerate of construction, lift, truck, power-train and agricultural tractors and equipment. CNH is a recent combination of multiple brands (Case, New Holland, Intl Harvester, Steyr, Iveco and many more) under a single umbrella. CNH has more than 100 product lines and over 400 models of tractors, harvesters, material handling, seeding and other ag equipment. CNH regularly equips tractors with AccuGuide communication software and systems with section and rate control to enable variable-rate fertilizing, seeding and navigational guidance for repeatable accuracy at sub-inch levels. CNH also offers self-driving kits for their tractors and approximately 60% of tractors sold include that feature. CNH is a funding and consortium member in a variety of sensing and manipulation projects under the EU’s Clever Robots for Crops program. These include a sweet-pepper harvesting robot, an apple harvesting robot, precision and canopy optimized spraying robots and other AI-based ag systems, none of which are currently available commercially.

CNH’s 2016 overall revenues were unchanged from 2015. Ag equipment represents 40% of CNH sales and those were down 11% from 2015. Quoting from the Chairman’s statement in the annual report: “We are projecting that the industry demand in the NAFTA and EMEA regions will remain challenging until we see higher agricultural commodity prices, the effect of this should be partially moderated by expected improved demand conditions in the LATAM region as those economies recover.”

Bottom Line

All of the equipment makers — John Deere, AGCO (including the Massey Ferguson, Fendt, Valtra and Challenger brands), Claas, the Argo Group (including the Landini, McCormick and Valpadana brands), the Same Deutz Fahr Group (including the Same, Lamborghini, Hurlimann and Deutz brands), CNH Industrial and Kubota — plus Trimble, Raven and all the other support businesses, are projecting a slow but steady progression toward the acceptance of precision ag products, software, equipment and practices. Only then will they push to add robots to the process.

All of these companies are fighting to retain profitability while current demand is slow. Nevertheless, they are providing incremental solutions that help farmers become digital precision farmers, i.e, connected farmers with streaming data flows from all over the farm and aggregating that data into software applications and platforms from which localized farming decisions can be made. Once farmers begin to use their data to make those decisions, they will need variable-rate machines to execute them, at which time they will want and need to use robotic devices.

At present, there is an upsurge in post processing robotics, i.e., in sorting, inspecting, deleafing, packaging, boxing and palletizing performed at packing houses and co-ops. Newer robotics such as seeding, weeding, variable-rate spraying and harvesting are still being field tested and are presently too expensive and untried for general deployment.

Deere, Raven and Trimble are members of the 80+ stocks included in the ROBO Global Robotics & Automation Index, a leading indicator of the robotics and automation market. CNH and many others are, for the time being, less robotically-involved. For more information about the index or the 80+ member companies, go to ROBO Global’s website.

Image: Swarmfarm

Soil compression can be a serious problem, but it isn’t always, or in all ways, a bad thing. For example, impressions made by hoofed animals, so long as they only cover a minor fraction of the soil surface, create spaces in which water can accumulate and help it percolate into the soil more effectively, avoiding erosion runoff.

The linear depressions made by wheels rolling across the surface are more problematic because they create channels that can accelerate the concentration of what would otherwise be evenly distributed rainfall, turning it into a destructive force. This is far less serious when those wheels follow the contour of the land rather than running up and down slopes.

Taking this one step further, if it is possible for wheeled machines to always follow the same tracks, the compression is localized and the majority of the land area remains unaffected. If those tracks are filled with some material though which water can percolate but which impedes the accumulation of energy in downhill flows, the damage is limited to the sacrifice of the portion of the overall land area dedicated to those tracks and the creation of compression zones beneath them, which may result in boggy conditions on the uphill sides of the tracks, which may or may not be a bad thing, depending on what one is trying to grow there.

Source: vinbot.eu

(I should note at this point that such tracks, when they run on the contour, are reminiscent of the ‘swales’ used in permaculture and regenerative agriculture.)

Tractors with GPS guidance are capable of running their wheels over the same tracks with each pass, but the need for traction, so they can apply towing force to implements running through the soil, means that those tracks will constitute a significant percentage of the overall area. Machines, such as dedicated sprayers, with narrower wheels that can be spread more widely apart, create tracks which occupy far less of the total land area, but they are not built for traction, and using them in place of tractors for all field operations would require a very different approach to farming.

It is possible to get away from machine-caused soil compression altogether, using either aerial machines (drones) or machines which are supported by or suspended from fixed structures, like posts or rails.

Small drones are much like hummingbirds in that they create little disturbance, but they are also limited in the types of operations they can perform by their inability to carry much weight or exert significant force. They’re fine for pollination but you wouldn’t be able to use them to uproot weeds with tenacious roots or to harvest watermelons or pumpkins.

On the other hand, fixed structures and the machines that are supported by or suspended from them have a significant up-front cost. In the case of equipment suspended from beams or gantries spanning between rails and supported from wheeled trucks which are themselves supported by rails, there is a tradeoff between the spacing of the rails and the strength/stiffness required in the gantry. Center-pivot arrangements also have such a tradeoff, but they use a central pivot in place of one rail (or wheel track), and it’s common for them to have several points of support spaced along the beam, requiring several concentric rails or wheel tracks.

Strictly speaking, there’s no particular advantage in having rail-based systems follow the contour of the land since they leave no tracks at all. Center-pivot systems using wheels that run directly on the soil rather than rail are best used on nearly flat ground since their round tracks necessarily run downhill over part of their circumference. In any rail-based system, the “rail” might be part of the mobile unit rather than part of the fixed infrastructure, drawing support from posts spaced closely enough that there were always at least two beneath it. However, this would preclude using trough-shaped rails to deliver water for irrigation.

Since the time of expensive machines is precious, it’s best to avoid burdening them with operations that can be handled by small, inexpensive drones, and the ideal arrangement is probably a combination of small drones, a smaller number of larger drones with some carrying capacity, light on-ground devices that put little pressure on the soil, and more substantial machines supported or suspended from fixed infrastructure, whether rail, center-pivot, or something else. Livestock (chickens, for example), outfitted with light wearable devices, might also be part of the mix.

The small drones, being more numerous, will be the best source of raw data, which can be used to optimize the operation of the larger drones, on-ground devices, and the machines mounted on fixed infrastructure, although too much centralized control would not be efficient. Each device should be capable of continuing to do useful work even when it loses network connection, and peer-to-peer connections will be more appropriate than running everything through a central hub in some circumstances.

Bonirob, an agricultural robot. Source: Bosch

This is essentially a problem in complex swarm engineering, complex because of the variety of devices involved. Solving it in a way that creates a multi-device platform capable of following rules, carrying out plans, and recognizing anomalous conditions is the all-important first step in enabling the kind of robotics that can then go one to enable regenerative practices in farming (and land management in general).

If you enjoyed this article, you may also want to read:

• How regenerative agriculture and robotics can benefit each other
• How AR technology can help farmers stay relevant
• Robohub roundtable: Robotic bee swarms from Black Mirror – what’s hype, what’s real?
• Drought and desertification: How robots might help
• Keeping a robotic eye on pollution

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

At RoboUniverse in San Diego, agricultural robots and the labor shortage were quickly identified as the biggest issues facing the industry today. Water scarcity and field health were other key issues mentioned, but it’s labor that keeps farmers up at night and robotics that could come to their rescue.

Current situation: Interim solutions

Labor availability and lack of fully effective automation have pushed some farming businesses to give up growing certain crops.

“We purposefully moved away from crops that require a lot of labor,” said Stuart Woolf, president and CEO of Woolf Farming & Processing, a Central Valley family farming group. “We now focus on tomatoes, almonds and other crops that can be mechanically harvested.”

However, pushing up the price of his fruit to pay for the increased labor costs is not a long-term solution, as Woolf said:

“I don’t want my commodity to become a luxury item that only a few can afford to eat. The labor issue will not get better, and we’re at a tipping point now, so we need to combine technology and labor to enable us to stay competitive; we can’t keep raising prices, it won’t work in the marketplace.”

Another California fruit farmer, Harold McClarty, president of HMC Farms, said:

“We won’t find a technology that picks fruit the way we do. I have yet to find a robot with an effective, dexterous arm. Instead we are developing certain things that we can use in the packing houses. There are lots of modifications that can be made in the packing houses; they’re a much better and easier place to innovate.”

At RoboUniverse, in a track entitled The Intersection of Technology and Applications in Agriculture coordinated by ag tech startup Food Origins CEO Nathan Dorn, participants were presented with robotics-related technological opportunities from computer vision to AI and from soft and hard gripping to intelligent path planning. There was also a panel where farm managers described their needs and impatience waiting for technology to effectively perform.

[Food Origins is developing sensing technology and analytics that allows it to gather and parse data in new and disruptive ways tracking value from harvest to table, allowing transparency and traceability.]

Dino Giacomazzi of Giacomazzi Dairy Farms said, “Our workforce is either 25 years old or 65 years old. There is no in between right now and that is a problem. The 25-year-old farm hands either don’t like the work or find better work and are gone after payday. I have living animals who need the engagement from good people or good machines.”

In June, The Green Economy quoted Kip Tom, a 7th generation Indiana farmer who heads Tom Farms, an enterprise that encompasses 20,000 acres of corn and soybean across 7 Indiana counties and is also one of Monsanto’s largest seed producers, who said:

“Farmers that don’t learn about these new ag technologies will get left behind. Whether it’s information and technology, or equipment technology, there are technologies that will help our industry deliver a sustainable, affordable, and nutritious supply of food to global consumers. It’s exciting, but what is most exciting is when we see collaboration between people in the field, who understand what we need, and developers in places like Silicon Valley and the investment community saying this is something new that we haven’t paid much attention to.”

Brian Antle, of Tanimura & Antle (T&A), built a 600-unit housing facility in Spreckels, California, to house temporary agricultural workers with H2A visas. T&A has also invested in many ag tech startups. Antle said that it was no longer an option to sit on the sidelines and wait for machinery builders to deliver solutions.

“We are all losing opportunities to sell quality products because the lettuce is picked late or we are too short staffed to meet our goals. If we cannot get more people, we must find machines.”

Trends and forecasts

Data generated by sensors or drones and collected by farms on the field or during field operations offer a wealth of information about soil, seeds, livestock, crops, costs, farm equipment and the use of water and fertilizer. Low-cost Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and advanced analytics are already beginning to help farmers analyze data like weather, temperature, moisture, prices, and communication signals, and provide insights on how to optimize and increase yield, improve farm planning, make smarter decisions about the level of resources needed, and determine when and where to distribute those resources in order to prevent waste and increase yield.

Efficiency and productivity will increase in the next few years as precision agricultural methods become more prevalent and farms become smarter and more connected, but this could just be the precursor to even greater use of robotic technology in farming.

BusinessInsider Intelligence predicts that IoT device installations in the agriculture world will increase from 30 million units in 2015 to 75 million in 2020, for a compound annual growth rate of 20%.

OnFarm, a startup that makes an IoT platform, ran studies and determined that for the average farm, yield rose by 1.75%, energy costs dropped $7 to $13 per acre, and water use for irrigation fell by 8% when IoT devices streamed their data to software that analyzed all the input sources and output meaningful farm management prescriptions.

A new report by Tractica, a Colorado research firm, forecasts that shipments of agricultural robots will increase significantly in the years ahead, rising from 32,000 units in 2016 to 594,000 units annually in 2024, by which time the market is expected to reach $74.1 billion in annual revenue.

Robotics companies are keenly focused on the agricultural market opportunity. The Tractica report examined 178 industry participants – a particularly large number – who are developing and launching robotic systems to address the need for more automation to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and address labor concerns in the agriculture market.

Tractica’s report, “Agricultural Robots”, developed in collaboration with The Robot Report, examines global market trends for agricultural robots and provides 10-year market sizing and forecasts for agricultural robot shipments and revenue during the period from 2015 through 2024.  The report examines the market opportunities, barriers, and technology issues for each of the key application markets.  Market forecasts are segmented by world region and application type.  The study also includes 178 profiles of industry players in the agricultural robot market.

If you enjoyed this article about agricultural robotics, you may also want to read:

• How regenerative agriculture and robotics can benefit each other
• Swarms of precision agriculture robots could help put food on the table
• Top 10 technologies in precision agriculture
• How AR technology can help farmers stay relevant

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

A plant-moving robot from Billerica-based Harvest Automation. Source: harvestai/YouTube

To meet rising food demands from a growing global population, over 250 million acres of arable land will be needed – about 20% more land than all of Brazil. Alternatively, agricultural production will need to be more productive and more sustainable using our present acreage. Meeting future needs requires investment in alternative practices such as urban and vertical farming as well as existing indoor and covered methods.

Ray Kurzweil, futurist, inventor and Google’s Director of Engineering, said in an interview in The Times in 2013:

There will be a new vertical agriculture revolution, because right now we use up a third of the usable land of the world to produce food, which is very inefficient. Instead we will grow food in a computerized vertical factory building (which is a more efficient use of real estate) controlled by artificial intelligence, which recycles all of the nutrients so there’s no environmental impact at all.

Fully automated regional vertical farms for leafy greens and other commodity crops has long been a vision of the future. Capital costs and other vagaries have prevented such development to date, but lower costs for technology and automation plus higher costs for labor, land and other resources, are making Kurzweil’s predictions come true. There are dozens of vertical farms around the world today with more being built.

Spread, a Japanese factory farmer with a large facility near Kyoto that serves the two metropolitan areas of Kyoto and Osaka, is nearing completion of a fully automated 52,000 sq ft facility where 98% of water will be recycled and seeding, watering, applying fertilizer and harvesting will all be automated. No earth; just shelves on top of shelves from floor to ceiling. They predict 30,000 heads of lettuce can be harvested and delivered daily throughout the year.

Propelling this indoor and vertical farming movement are three influential trends. The Boston Consulting Group, in 2015, produced a study entitled “Crop Farming 2030, the Reinvention of the Sector,” and cited (1) the steady global movement toward precision farming, (2) the availability of economical automation and robotics, and (3) the growing labor shortage as the drivers of the movement.

Vertical farming:

Food grown year round in buildings near urban centers provides many advantages: being close to the point of consumption reduces both distribution costs and spoilage. Outdoor farming is vulnerable to pests and disease, which in turn means intensive use of pesticides and herbicides causing problems with runoff as well as food safety. Vertical farms protect crops from weather and pests and reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides and herbicides. Hydroponic and aeroponic water methods save massive amounts of water compared to outdoor farming. Consequently, as these farms become more prevalent, they could provide a major new role for the ag industry to produce a wide range of commercial crops with major savings in space and water use. In the case of Spread, cited above, they are able to grow lettuce indoors using less than 1% of the water that California Central Valley growers use to grow the same product!

Agriculture accounts for around 70% of water used in the world today according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development). As population and climate change progress, food needs will grow, and more efficient use of water in ag must happen as well. Vertical farms reduce water usage through recirculating hydroponics, evaporative cooling, control of in- and out-airflow, and other methods. Urban Crops, a Belgian factory farmer and technology provider uses this chart to show the benefits of vertical factory farms versus other methods:

Greenhouse and wholesale nurseries

Greenhouse technology is ideal to protect plants from adverse climatic conditions, insects and disease and to nurse, propagate and grow plants to usable and/or harvestable size. Greenhouses can be framed or inflated structures covered with glass or transparent or translucent material. Greenhouse yields are often 10-15% greater that outdoor yields, consistency and quality tend to be greater, and the growing season is longer.

Similar to vertical farms, greenhouses have high upfront costs and operating expenses, and crop selection must not require pollination. Whether plants are grown in the field or indoors, nurseries transplant, graft, or germinate plants to create seedlings for resale. Their processes are quite complex on two levels: (1) the technical aspects of growing plants which require management of the environment, plant nutrition, propagation, transplanting, irrigation, and pest and disease control, and (2) the business aspects of managing production, labor, customers, distribution and other activities associated with a business. Many nurseries use automation and some level of robotics. Harvest Automation and their mobile robots rearranging potted plants and Urbinati and Visser and their robotic transplanting devices are all examples of the levels of automation utilized in nursery operations.

Commercial and emerging providers:

• AeroFarms – A NJ indoor farmer that is marketing their technology to other prospective vertical farmers. AeroFarms grows a wide variety of leafy greens without sun or soil in a fully-controlled indoor environment using a system of aeroponic misting of the roots for faster harvest cycles, predictable results, food safety and less environmental impact.
• Aris – is a Dutch engineering and systems provider. Many of their projects are integrated with vision and robotics that identify, grade, sort and analyze everything from orchids to chickens, from potted plants to seedlings. Using their systems, nursery clients can then grade and robotically cut branches which can then be potted.
• ALCI Visionics & Robotics – A French integrator of vision and robotics technologies for meat and fish slicing and packaging and for nurseries and growers for potting plants and seed germination, analysis and classification for corn, rice and wheat.
• Conic Systems – a Spanish provider of greenhouse equipment including robotic and software-controlled grafting, seeding and planting systems.
• Demtec – A long established Belgium-based maker of a wide range of horticultural machinery including potting machines, seeders, planters and transplanters. Many of these processes have integrated industrial and mobile robots into their systems. Demtec robotics also play a big part in flat and shelf handling, packaging, palletization, and shipping.
• Egatec A/S – a Danish integrator of end-of-line packaging, boxing and palletizing systems for the ag and food processing industries.
• Harvest Automation – a Boston-area mobile robotics provider with nursery applications for spacing, a task that involves bending over, picking up one or two containers often weighing up to 22 pounds each, walking a few steps and then bending over again to place them in a predefined pattern.  The company recently divested a warehousing variation on their mobile robot to better focus on ag industry applications.
• Helper Robotech – a Korean manufacturer of robotic grafting, smart seeding and other smart devices. They also make a wide range of nursery products to nurture seedlings to maturity.
• HETO Agrotechnics – a Dutch manufacturer of horticulture machines including robotic potting systems and pick and place systems for potted plants.
• Hortiplan – a Belgian integrator, reseller and provider of nursery equipment, supplies and mobile gully systems – which move in an automated way from the planting side to the harvesting station. Hortiplan also designs and sells lighting, irrigation and handling systems.
• Irmato Jentjens – An established Dutch builder of systems for automating food handling and packaging. Irmato also makes the Rombomatic, a robotic cutting system for nurseries that examines, assesses, cuts, powders and inserts cuttings into pots and other mediums. Jentjens is a funding partner in a variety of sensing and manipulation projects under the EU’s Clever Robots for Crops program. These include a sweet-pepper harvesting robot, an apple harvesting robot, precision and canopy-optimized spraying robots and other AI-based ag systems.
• Iron Ox – A Silicon Valley startup presently in stealth mode but hiring with a plan to provide a fully robotic, fully controlled environment for ag in a greenhouse growing leafy greens (lettuce, basil and bok choy) using natural light but mobile bots to move plants through each stage of development to harvesting, packaging and palletizing.
• ISO Group – a Netherlands-based supplier of automation solutions for nurseries. They adapt industrial robot technology for horticulture uses such as grafting, planting, vision inspection and replanting.
• Logiqs BV – a Dutch manufacturer of internal transport and logistics systems for greenhouses for growers of cut flowers, tree nurseries, flower bulbs, potted plants and vegetables. Their new modular GreenCube vertical cultivation system uses trays sensors and vertical transporters, also with sensors, for movement between layers and movement to and from the various stages of nursery growing operations.
• CMW Horticulture – a UK integrator and reseller of a whole range of greenhouse and nursery automation products including Logiqs mobility and handling systems
• Mirai Group – A Japanese farmer that, in 2009, became a member and leader of the Japanese government public-private consortium to develop low-cost plant factories. Today Mirai provides R&D and design-build services to grow leafy plants for farmers interested in vertical farming similar to what Spread is doing. Mirai is also producing and wholesaling leafy vegetables from a large plant factory located near Chiba, Japan.
• Photon Systems Instruments – An established Czech Republic provider of ag instruments including high throughput conveyor and robotic nursery phenotyping systems.
• Priva Group – a Dutch engineering, design and systems integrator for greenhouse nurseries. Recent projects include developing a leaf-removing robot for tomato plants. The lowest leaves of tomato plants are regularly removed to promote ripening (this process is called de-leafing).
• QUBIT Phenomics – a Canadian provider of conventional and robotic plant screening systems for nurseries and growers. The company’s PlantScreen Field Phenotyping System allows growers an automated non-invasive measurement of photosynthesis, leaf biochemical status, water status and canopy temperature. Greenhouses are the primary marketplace but the company hopes to break into field operations as well.  Many major biotech companies and universities have partnered with Qubit in the study of plant responses to various stresses.
• Spread – A Japanese lettuce grower, is constructing the world’s largest plant factory near Osaka and Kyoto. The new factory, scheduled for mid-2017, will be as robotically automated as possible. Spread’s existing facility, from which they are learning what tasks can be automated, produces 21,000 heads of lettuce per day using LED lighting, controlled air conditioning and recirculating water. Spread is planning to construct and operate 20 new factories in the next 5 years in addition to selling the technology for others to build their own plant factories.
• Urban Crops – A Belgium startup pioneering the distribution of robotized vertical farming and plant factories.  The company offers two types of products, one fits into a 40’ container and can be fully automated or not, and another is custom built for larger spaces. Currently the company has made a small number of sales and has partnered with companies such as Belgocatering, a Belguim based catering company, and a UAE group of investors.
• Urbinati – an Italian manufacturer of nursery technology including automated, and in some cases robotic, seeding, pot filling, transplanting, handling and irrigation devices. They also sell backroom processing robots such as palletizers.
• Transplant Systems – a NZ integrator and reseller of nursery machinery and robots from Urbinati and others.
• Visser – a Dutch provider of horticulture automation systems and complete production lines for large and small nurseries and greenhouses including a robot seeder, transplanter and packing and palletizing robots.

Agricultural Robotics: 160+ profiles

Working together with Tractica, a Colorado research firm, my team and I compiled a list of over 200 global businesses and agencies involved in developing robotic solutions for the ag industry. From that list, I was able to interview and profile over 160 companies and 16 research labs as follows:

• Academic and research labs (16)
• Backroom and post processing (5)
• Dairy and milking (10)
• Drones, analytics and data service providers (26)
• Farm equipment manufacturers (23)
• Harvesting, weeding and thinning robots (21)
• Hobby farming (2)
• Indoor and vertical farming (23)
• Integrator, distributor and reseller (20)
• Self-driving vehicles (15)
• UAS/UAV vendors (15)

This research report will be published in the next few weeks and will contain the whole list, the profiles, and the conclusions drawn from the research, interviews and analyses. The report will be $4,200 for a Basic License (1-5 users) or $6,300 for an Enterprise License.

Note: the link to the report is to the previous report with the same title and will be updated with new information just as soon as the new report is published.

Source: Nesta.org, Precision Agriculture

Farmers, ranchers and growers the world over are transitioning to precision agricultural methods, i.e., subdividing their acreage into many unique sub-plots — in some cases right down to the individual plant, tree, or animal — thereby enabling increased productivity, trace-ability and lower overall costs. Low-cost aerial vehicles, sensors and cameras are integral to the process and are being used to map, observe, sense and spray.

Digital farms are already a reality

Robotic automation is already widely practiced and can be seen today in milking systems and increasingly in precision techniques that use sensors and drone-mounted cameras to steer tractors and to monitor soil for temperature, moisture, disease, varmints, crop quantity, weather damage, and nutrient content. This data is then analyzed in order to improve decision-making on planting, weeding, pruning and chemical application. Digitally-controlled farm implements are already in use in developed countries and most Western farmers and ranchers are high-tech to some extent and more variable-rate dispensing devices are on the horizon. Self-steering kits can be found in most new tractors and follow RTK/GPS and digital guidance with levels of accuracy down to the centimeter level.

There are partially and fully automatic and robotic devices for most aspects of agricultural functions from grafting to planting, from harvesting to sorting, from packaging to boxing, but because the metrics of their implementation have thus far been too costly, and the safety and liability aspects difficult, so they are not widely deployed. These challenges are being met with a new group of vendors, lower costs, and new robotic products, often marketed in the form of Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS). Adding to these challenges are ever-increasing costs and lack of available water, labor and tillable land.

I observed an example of those additional challenges on a recent research trip to Odense, Denmark.

EGATEC A/S specializes in automated end-of-line packaging and palletizing solutions. They are an integrator. Rosborg Denmark is a nursery that grows and sells miniature flowerpots and spices. Rosborg is one of EGATEC’s clients and the two are working together to automate Rosborg’s end-of-line packaging process – a step that presently handles 12 million plants per year and which is done entirely by hand by 40-60 people.

Rosborg is already mechanized. They’ve automated their potting and seeding operations. Plants then are placed on mobile trays slowly moving towards the harvesting stations where fully-grown plants are picked, wrapped and packaged for boxing and palletizing. These latter steps are done by hand and are the steps being automated by EGATEC.

Many of Rosborg’s employees are immigrants eager for the work even though, by Danish standards, it is low paying. In Denmark non-citizens are subject to the same mixture of union and other agreements as citizens and thus their hourly wage approximates $20 an hour — quite high and easy for a robot packaging cell to beat.

Transformative effect on agricultural automation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) (drones) are stimulating this transformative effect on agricultural automation. UAVs are beginning to be used in areas as diverse as soil and field analysis, planting, crop spraying and monitoring, irrigation and plant and crop health assessment. They are producing valuable data enabling farmers to make better decisions.

However, amid the current shift toward precision agricultural practices, farmers are also running into hurdles with technology integration. Farmers often have to mix precision ag hardware and software with third-party vendors; the results can lead to lost time from a variety of reasons. To combat these barriers, many farm equipment conglomerates are upgrading their products and offering consolidation software. For example, Trimble Ag Software promises to seamlessly integrate with its hardware solutions as well as with other third-party manufacturers using Trimble’s API. By using one technology platform, data can flow wirelessly across the entire farm. This provides timely crop input recommendations and eliminates data re-entry, saving time and reducing potential errors.

Trimble’s Ag Software, like many others, is attempting to be an all-in-one tool offering customers a complete desktop, web-based and mobile-enabled agricultural software solution for farmers and their stakeholders: farm managers, supervisors, crop advisors, service providers, ag retailers and food processors.

Agricultural Robotics: 149 Profiles

Working together with Tractica, a Colorado research firm, my team and I compiled a list of over 200 global businesses and agencies involved in developing robotic solutions for the ag industry. From that list, I was able to interview and profile over 149 companies and 16 research labs as follows:

• Academic and research labs     (16)
• Backroom and post processing     (5)
• Dairy and milking     (10)
• Drones, analytics and data service providers     (26)
• Farm equipment manufacturers     (13)
• Harvesting, weeding and thinning robots     (21)
• Hobby farming     (2)
• Indoor and vertical farming     (23)
• Integrator, distributor and reseller     (20)
• Self-driving vehicles     (15)
• UAS/UAV vendors     (14)

Source: tractica.com

This research report will be published in the next few weeks and will contain the whole list, the profiles, and the conclusions drawn from the research, interviews and analyses. The report will be $4,200 for a Basic License (1-5 users) or $6,300 for an Enterprise License. Note: the link to the report is to the previous report and will be updated with new information just as soon as the report is published.

If you enjoyed this article, you may also enjoy these articles about agricultural robotics:

• Swarms of precision agriculture robots could help put food on the table
• Agricultural robot market anticipated to reach $16.3 billion by 2020
• Top 10 technologies in precision agriculture
• Robohub Digest 09/16: AI100, RoboLaw, sailing and farming robots
• In agriculture, robots replace job vacancies

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Silicon Valley Robotics Rich Mahoney and Andra Keay led a panel on robotics and agriculture. Here, they highlight NZ startups and innovation groups present at the event.

New Zealand AgTech Transforming Farming (in brochure order):

Aeronavics Ltd – sustainable, intelligent, aerial robotics solutions, exported world wide for applications including media, surveying, mapping, farming and precision agriculture, emergency services and industrial inspections.

Agri Optics NZ Ltd – innovative sensor technology for nitrogen application to specifically target pasture that needs it, or remove weeds. Agri Optics also collects spatial soil data with EM sensors to enable variable rate irrigation.

Autogrow Systems Ltd – intelligent automation for greenhouses and controlled environment agriculture. Supporting NZ greenhouses and now worldwide with vertical growing, building conversion and shipping container-based systems.

BBC Tech – award-winning developers and manufacturers of advanced fruit and vegetable processing equipment. Specializing in delicate commodities, like berries. Offering handling, sorting, packing and traceability solutions in various industries.

Beezthingz – standardised apiary data collection using machine learning to protect the delicate beehive ecosystem. You can also rent or buy a hive.

Biolumic – unlocking the potential of UV light for large growing concerns across the globe. The technology activates molecular pathways that improve plant responses to environmental stress, resulting in increased crop survival, superior size and improved crop consistency.

Bluelab – high quality, easy to use monitoring and  control instruments widely used in hydroponic, aquaponic, aquaculture, horticulture and general agriculture applications.

Compac – provides integrated post-harvest solutions and services to the global fresh produce industry, with centers of excellence and manufacturing locations around the world.

CropLogic – advanced scientific plant growth models to forecast the future effects of today’s input decision on crop yield and quality, bringing optimization to agriculture.

Dotterel – UAV solutions for agriculture field trials and cinematography, with advanced active filtering and passive UAV noise reduction.

Fonterra Co-operative Group Ltd – global dairy nutrition company, owned by 10,500 New Zealand farmers and their families – shaping the industry in quality and innovation.

Gallagher – from creating the first electric fences to today’s leading smart animal management systems.

Gateway Data Services Ltd – secure cloud farm data service.

GPS-it Ltd – accurate mapping with drones and the conversion of data into clear visual reports.

LIC Automation – specialises in manufacturing integrated and innovative in-shed farm automation and sensor technology systems, enabling real-time on-farm milk analysis and improved herd management.

Page Bloomer Associates – linking and supporting the primary sector with science and technology providers to create economically and environmentally sensible solutions. Also founder of LandWISE, a charitable society focused on sustainable cropping through technology.

Regen Ltd – real time data from a range of sensors to help farmers manage efficient water use, nitrogen fertiliser and dairy effluent.

Rezare Systems – software to help agricultural businesses leverage mobile, big data and predictive modelling.

Robotics Plus Ltd – developing mechanisation, automation, robotics and sensor technologies that solve primary sector problems, including using both off the shelf products and building our own robotic arms and control systems to meet end user specifications.

“Customer insight is critical to creating systems suitable for industry.”

Southern Photonics – development of laser systems and their applications in micro-machining and environmental sensing, both fibre optic and laser based gas sensing systems which can detect fruit ripeness and monitor for pollutants.

Tag It Technologies – innovative farm automation system combining software, cctv camera systems, telemetry hardware, and wireless networks.

TracMap – solving vehicle logistics problems for large agriculture operations.

Sprout AgTech Accelerator – identifying the top NZ agricultural startups and providing funding, mentorship and training with industry leaders in technology, research and business growth. Unparalleled access to the NZ and global farming network.

WNT Ventures Management Ltd – technology focused incubator for high growth, early stage primary sector technologies, including agriculture, horticulture and food technologies.

The Dodd-Walls Center for Photonic and Quantum Technologies – spanning 5 of New Zealand’s universities with research excellence in light and light-based technologies, translated into impact.

New Zealand Center for Precision Agriculture (NZCPA) – research center focused on creating practical land management solutions through the use of leading-edge precision technology tools.

The Lincoln Hub – collaboration between industry, education and research to transform the productivity and performance of the primary sector and enhance sustainable outcomes.

Wharf42 – supporting early stage Kiwi tech companies to connect with Silicon Valley ecosystem.

NZTE – international business development agency, to help New Zealand businesses build strategic alliances and develop commercial relationships internationally.

Callaghan Innovation – New Zealand government business innovation agency, helping NZ businesses to succeed through technology.

The FAA granted Yamaha Motor Corporation an Agricultural Aircraft Operations certificate for their RMAX crop spraying remotely piloted helicopters.

This certification, plus the waiver issued earlier in the year allowing it to commercially fly over agricultural properties, complete the compliance aspect and enable Yamaha to begin agricultural spray service operations at the start of the 2016 growing season.

The RMAX is an unmanned, remotely piloted helicopter designed specifically for agricultural spraying and weighs just over 200 pounds with a full payload, and is designed for treating specialty and high-value crops. RMAX is an economical alternative to spraying with tractor-pulled ground or backpack sprayers.

The RMAX was originally introduced in Japan in 1997 as the culmination of several earlier unmanned helicopter models designed and engineered by Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. since 1980. Globally, there are nearly 2,600 RMAX helicopters currently in use, and over two million flight-hours have been logged to date, with more than 2.4 million acres being sprayed each year.

Source: Jeff Kubina via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s an interesting robotics challenge – a coalition of blueberry farmers are offering a $250,000 prize for automation solutions that improve blueberry picking. The deadline for entries in the competition has been extended to December 4, 2015. Apparently farmers can’t keep up with the record high demand for blueberries.

Naturipe Farms are leading the Naturipe Challenge and offering $250,000 in prize incentives for new solutions, not to mention of course the benefits that for an agricultural robotics company of gaining early access to industry partners and customers. Today only frozen blueberries are harvested by machine, and so the challenge is to improve automation solutions for fresh blueberry harvesting.

“The majority of the blueberries are picked by hand at the peak of maturity and flavor,” said Robert Verloop, Executive Vice President of Marketing at Naturipe.  “However, the berries don’t ripen at the same time so we return to the same bush several times during the harvest season, which is both costly and a labor intensive process. There has been tremendous growth and interest in agricultural technology, robotics and sensory equipment to improve harvesting efficiencies, to manage costs and to reduce food waste.  We hope the ‘Naturipe Blue Challenge’ will help solve some of our on-the-farm challenges.” 

Main proposed operating specifications include: size/color sensing for detecting fruit maturity, careful handling to avoid any damage to the fruit, ability to directly fill field trays/baskets, 24/7 harvesting capability, average production of 500 Kg/day, mobility capabilities on uneven ground or dusty conditions, and fabrication costs per unit <$500,000 USD.

https://youtu.be/eDNXrzKQZDY

For more information or to submit an expression of interest, check out www.naturipechallenge.com.

Dry California riverbed. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Groundwater levels in California’s Central Valley are down to historic lows and reservoirs have been depleted following four consecutive years of severe drought in the state. California is set to introduce water rationing in the coming weeks, and though the new rationing rules will focus on urban areas and not farms for the time being, they serve as a warning bell to farmers who will inevitably need to adapt to the effects of climate change on food production. Long term solutions are needed to help make agriculture drought resistant. How could robotics help?

A NYTimes article published April 2nd, Mapping the Spread of Drought Across the U.S., leads off with an animated map supplied by the National Drought Mitigation Center, which shows the spread of drought conditions across the contiguous 48 states since late fall, 2014.

From that article:

Droughts appear to be intensifying over much of the West and Southwest as a result of global warming. Over the past decade, droughts in some regions have rivaled the epic dry spells of the 1930s and 1950s. About 37 percent of the contiguous United States was in at least a moderate drought as of March 31, 2015.

There are two major ways in which robots might help with the effects of climate change upon food production.

Most immediately, robots might operate indoor production facilities to produce high value, quickly maturing crops requiring moist environments. Because space would be at a premium in such facilities, and in most cases the lighting would be artificial, to make most best use of both, plants would need to be gradually spread apart as they grow, an operation well suited to pick-and-place robots, assisted by mobile robots serving them trays of plants. To operate most efficiently, that artificial light should be predominantly red and blue, since green light is mostly reflected away by plants; this might prove a stressful environment for human workers, but robots won’t care. Moreover, once an optimal configuration has been determined – how many trays of plants one pick-and-place robot can keep up with – the entire operation could easily be replicated as many times as needed, constrained only be available space, electrical power, and a market for the produce.

The other way in which robots might help is in dry fields under the hot sun. This could be as simple as reflective umbrellas, nets, or horizontal shutters that shade the ground from the mid-day sun, but uncover it again in the late afternoon to allow built up heat to radiate into the night sky. Robots could also maintain drip-irrigation systems or make daily rounds to inject water into the soil near root crowns.

image from: United States Drought Monitor

In principle, they could also perform planting, weeding, pest control, pruning, harvesting, and deal with plant materials left behind after harvest, and do it all while working a mixture of annuals between and around standing perennials – although much of the technology needed for such a scenario remains to be developed.

On the other hand, given that level of utility, much could become possible that currently is not. The weight of heavy machinery could be kept off of productive soil, rendering it more capable of holding water. Mulch could be applied at any time. When expected precipitation fails to materialize, plants could be pruned to reduce their leaf area and the amount of water they require. Windbreaks could be installed surrounding relatively small patches of land, in a manner not conducive to tractors and conventional implements, but affording much better protection from drying winds as well as providing a secondary crop of woody fiber and habitat for wildlife. If planted in low berms, those windbreaks could also help to keep what moisture there is in the fields and eliminate water erosion.

The benefits of such technology aren’t limited to coping with drought, of course, but given that drought is likely to be a widespread, persistent problem, robotics could be used to help keep marginal land – which might otherwise turn to desert – in sustainable production, and perhaps even help to reclaim some land that has already been lost to desertification, beginning, for example, with the construction of windbreak fences (like snow fences) to accumulate wind-blown dust that will become the berms into which living windbreaks can be planted. Windbreaks are an essential permanent feature of productive land in arid and semi-arid environments, so if a robot or set of robots is to tend land that is affected by drought it/they should be able to perform the operations necessary to establish and maintain a windbreak.  Many windbreaks have been torn out because they impede the movement of large tractors, which require large fields to operate efficiently. Removing the motivation to tear out windbreaks and bringing the capability to replant them where they’ve already been torn out is one major way robots could contribute to making agriculture drought resistant.

Flourish, which has been funded at just over €3.5 Million for 42 months, will be managed by Cyrill Stachniss of the University of Bonn, Germany. It is described both in the H2020 document and on the university’s website as follows:

To feed a growing world population with the given amount of available farm land, we must develop new methods of sustainable farming that increase yield while reducing reliance on herbicides and pesticides. Precision agricultural techniques seek to address this challenge by monitoring key indicators of crop health and targeting treatment only to plants that need it. This is a time consuming and expensive activity and while there has been great progress on autonomous farm robots, most systems have been developed to solve only specialized tasks. This lack of flexibility poses a high risk of no return on investment for farmers. The goal of the Flourish project is to bridge the gap between the current and desired capabilities of agricultural robots by developing an adaptable robotic solution for precision farming. By combining the aerial survey capabilities of a small autonomous multi-copter Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with a multi-purpose agricultural Unmanned Ground Vehicle, the system will be able to survey a field from the air, perform targeted intervention on the ground, and provide detailed information for decision support, all with minimal user intervention. The system can be adapted to a wide range of crops by choosing different sensors and ground treatment packages. This development requires improvements in technological abilities for safe accurate navigation within farms, coordinated multi-robot mission planning that enables large field survey even with short UAV flight times, multispectral three-dimensional mapping with high temporal and spatial resolution, ground intervention tools and techniques, data analysis tools for crop monitoring and weed detection, and user interface design to support agricultural decision making. As these aspects are addressed in Flourish, the project will unlock new prospects for commercial agricultural robotics in the near future.

SWEEPER, which has been funded at just over €4 Million for 36 months, will be managed by Jan Bontsema of Wageningen UR, Netherlands. It is described in the H2020 document as follows:

In modern greenhouses there is a high demand to automate labour. The availability of a skilled workforce that accepts repetitive tasks in the harsh climate conditions of a greenhouse is decreasing rapidly. The resulting increase in labour costs and reduced capacity puts major pressure on the competitiveness of the European greenhouse sector. Present robotization of this labour has entered a high level of technological readiness. However, a gap remains which halts the transition from science to economic and societal impact; the so called ‘Technological Innovation Gap’. In the EU-FP7-project CROPS, extensive research has been performed on agricultural robotics. One of the applications was a sweet pepper harvesting robot. It was shown that such a robot is economically and technically viable. The proven hardware and software modules (TRL: 6) developed in CROPS will be used as the groundwork. The successful CROPS software modules based on the Robotic-Operating-System (ROS) will be maintained and expanded in SWEEPER. Also the gripper end-effector will be retained. This patent pending module is able to grasp the sweet pepper without the need of an accurate measurement of the position and orientation of the fruit. In several experiments, it turned out that different growers use different cropping systems ranging in crop density. In SWEEPER, the cropping system itself will be optimized to facilitate robotic harvesting. In CROPS it was concluded that instead of a 9DOF, a 4DOF robot arm is sufficient, greatly reducing costs. To improve the level of robotic cognitive abilities, plant models will be applied to approximate location of sweet peppers. This “model-based vision” will increase and speed up fruit detection. Based on the insights of CROPS, sensors will be placed onto the gripper only. Also a LightField sensor will be introduced, which is able to record both colour and 3D information simultaneously.

The “CROPS” referred to above is Clever Robots for Crops, a program of the 7th Framework, which preceded H2020.

The first H2020 call for proposals was issued last year as a follow up to the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7), and includes over 100 collaborative robotics projects under the Digital Agenda framework. To learn more about the other robotics projects funded under H2020, see this post by Frank Tobe.

77% of all agricultural workers in the US are foreign born and about half of those are undocumented¹. These low-wage workers have helped keep American food prices reasonable – especially for growing, harvesting and processing fruits and vegetables.

Legal migrant farm labor is getting hard to find, wages are rising, and the workers less reliable. This isn’t just an American problem; it’s worldwide. 

David Lane, chair of the UK Technology Strategy Board’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) special interest group, said, “It’s important we don’t dilly-dally, because the race is on.”²

The race has been slow-going up until now. Farmers are very pragmatic and cost conscious. They have gradually moved toward precision agriculture (AKA satellite farming or site specific crop management (SSCM)). (Precision agriculture is farming management based on observing and responding to intra-field variations.) But they have not yet embraced robotics. They are beginning to experiment with data from aerial robots, kits that enable self-driving of tractors, and advanced GPS and communications systems, but for a variety of reasons have not moved past the experimental phase.

If and when new robotic products do their jobs efficiently, reliably and economically AND low-cost labor cannot be found, farmers will change their methods and begin to deploy robots. They haven’t needed to until now. The only real questions are (1) whether the robots will be funded, developed, field tested and produced in time, (2) will these new devices do their jobs properly and economically, or (3) will consumer prices need to rise to compensate for higher wages because no robots could be adapted to the work?

Here are some of the factors effecting change:

Migrant labor:

• Farm wages in Mexico are rising, giving jobs to those that used to go to the US for work
• Other less gruelling jobs are becoming available within Mexico and in the US, providing choices where there were few before
• Fewer migrant workers are coming to the US each year
• States are passing and enforcing stricter immigration laws deterring undocumented workers
• Income is a major factor in the migration away from farming: Farm production expenses in the US average $109,359 per year per farm while less than 1 in 4 of the farms produce gross revenues in excess of $50,000³

Use of robots:

• Researchers are forecasting expansion of the agricultural robot market from $817 million in 2013 to an anticipated $16.3 billion by 2020⁴
• Robotic harvesting, irrigation, pruning, weeding and thinning devices are being field-tested all around the world
• Robotic spraying and seeding have been going on in Japan and Australia for years
• Driverless tractors are beginning to be deployed and provide less compaction than do traditional tractors
• Robotic cow milking systems are making inroads in the US
• Nurseries are beginning to use pick-and-place robots
• Aerial observation robots will likely add to the precision of the global precision agricultural movement once FAA regulations are in place in late 2015
• ABB, KUKA and Yaskawa have made little inroads in the industry although they do provide robots to help make farm tools and tractors and material handling equipment
• Fanuc, KUKA and Adept have a presence in food sorting and processing but not in growing or harvesting

Other drivers:

• Using LED lighting has enabled year-around indoor farming which further enables the metrics for greenhouse robotic processing
• Better and more specific crop, chemical, air and soil sensors – all at low cost – enables better understanding of crop variability and improves precision methods
• Learning systems and big data processing help farmers overlay more and more data to understand their farms better and make their precision methods more accurate
• Swarm technologies and better telematic systems can optimize equipment and control swarm activity, e.g., variable rate swath control to save on seed, minerals, fertilizer and herbicides by reducing overlapping

Governmental funding in the US has been paltry: the USDA has awarded grants totaling $4.5 million for robotics research. Growers Associations and large ag equipment producers have given research grants or done internal R&D supplementing the USDA. Venture capital firms, in a quest to incubate new technology for the industry, have invested $71.1 million in 8 ag-related start-up companies in the last two years⁵. European public-private-partnerships for various agricultural projects (shown below) has been sufficient to give an edge to EU ag equipment providers as well as start-up companies.

Companies and research facilities to watch: NOTE: If you know of any companies not in this list, please send them to me. Thanks.

• 3D Robotics
• AGCO (Fendt)
• AgriFlight
• AgroBot
• AgRobotics
• Autonomous Tractor
• BA Systemes
• Blue River Technologies
• CLAAS Agrosystems
• Clever Robots for Crops
• CNH Industrial
• Cyberdyne
• Dorhout R&D
• Energid
• F Poulsen Aps
• Festo
• Force A
• Fullwood Ltd
• Garford Farm Machinery
• Harvest Automation
• Insentec BV
• Irmato
• Jentjens
• John Deere
• Kinze Manufacturing
• Kongskilde Industries (DK)
• Lely Group (NL)
• Mack Robotics
• Maf Roda Agrobotic
• Magnificent Pty
• Naio Technologies
• National Robotics Engineering Center at CMU
• Precision Hawk
• Robotic Harvesting
• Rovibec Agrisolutions
• Rowbot
• SenseFly
• SmartBot
• Trimble
• Vitirover SJCS
• Wall-Ye
• Washington State U
• Yamaha
  

In the next while, The Robot Report will be posting profiles of many of these companies, their robotics-related products, and their stage of development and field testing. Stay tuned …

[1] America is running out of farm workers by Brad Plumer, Vox, 7/5/14
[2] RAS 2020: Robotics and Autonomous Systems, The Knowledge Transfer Network, July, 2014
[3] Top 5 agricultural technologies, by RBR, 5/21/14
[4] WinterGreen Research press release: Agricultural Robots, 1/28/14
[5] Hizook:http://www.hizook.com/blog/2014/06/25/venture-capital-vc-funding-robotics-2013 and http://www.hizook.com/blog/2013/06/10/venture-capital-vc-funding-robotics-2012

Robohub is an online platform that brings together leading communicators in robotics research, start-ups, business, and education from around the world. Learn more about us here. If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Focus Series: The state-of-the-art and the future of agricultural robotics
• Ten lessons for farm drones
• Lay of the land: Unmanned systems coming to commercial agriculture
• Robots: Zero Tillage Robotics

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley speaks with Professor Peter Corke from Queensland University of Technology, about the fast-tracking research that will see robots planting, weeding, maintaining and harvesting crops. The AgBot is a light-weight, golf buggy-sized robot that has been specifically designed to reduce the environmental impact of weeding. It can navigate wheat farms of around 4000 hectares using low-cost sensors, targeting weeds with spray while they are still very young plants. The Chief Investigators are Peter Corke, Ben Upcroft, Gordon Wyeth and Salah Sukkarieh (ACFR) with Partner Investigator Andrew Bate from SwarmFarm.

Peter Corke
Peter Corke joined Queensland University of Technology at the start of 2010 and is known for his research in vision-based robot control, field robotics and wireless sensor networks. He received a B.Eng and M.Eng.Sc. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering, and a PhD in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, all from the University of Melbourne. Prior to QUT he was a senior principal research scientist at CSIRO where he founded the Autonomous Systems Laboratory, a 50-person team undertaking research in mining, ground, aerial and underwater robotics, as well as sensor networks. He subsequently led a major cross-organizational “capability platform” in wireless sensor networks.

Links:

• Download mp3 (14.1 MB)
• Subscribe to Robots using iTunes
• Subscribe to Robots using RSS
• Peter Corke Web Site
• AgBot

Keystone Technology’s LED vegetable garden system is a cultivation system for indoor plant factories that uses LED lighting instead of sunlight. The most defining feature of the system on display at the company’s showroom in Yokohama is its 3-dimensional use of space. “This is a 5-tiered cultivation system. For smaller heads of lettuce, you can harvest about 1,500 heads in one month. If this were to be fit into a container of about 20 feet (6m), it would be equivalent to 970 sq. meters. Thus with 16 sq. meters, you could produce an amount that is on par with 970 sq. meters.”

LED lighting has three different wavelengths of red, blue, and green. This system can control the illumination strength according to the stage of plant growth. So, cultivation that would require two and a half months with land cultivation can be reduced to less than one month of cultivation and harvesting.

“In most cases, lettuce grown indoors is crisper and does not have the coarse quality of lettuce grown in sunlight. Because it is softer, it is a vegetable that is easy to eat even for elderly people. Although this may be unexpected, as for the nutritional components or more accurately the functional ingredients, it is possible to obtain a larger content by percentage of vitamins and polyphenols than with vegetables grown in sunlight.”

With this system, there will be differences in production capacity depending on the shape of the plant. Because plants with leaves that spread sideways take up more space, the number of such stalks that can be cultivated is reduced. On the other hand, plants that grow upwards can be planted with smaller intervals so a greater number of stalks can be cultivated.

“This plant factory itself has been here for over 20 years, but there is very little history of plants grown with LED lighting. In particular for plants grown with red, blue, and green lighting, the produce displayed at a plant factory exhibition in July 2010 was our company’s first ever.”

Commercially available since 2010, this system has been installed in various factories, offices and eateries nationwide, such as by a leading eating establishment that has installed 48 units in its processing factory in Kanagawa Prefecture. As workers in Japan’s agricultural industry age, it is becoming more difficult to obtain safe and delicious vegetables through traditional farming techniques. Keystone Technology will continue to offer new lifestyle ideas that provide cities with production capacity and integrate consumption and production.

One Florida nursery said: Robot operating cost alone was quite competitive, but when we considered all the added benefits of lower insurance costs, improved worker health and safety, lower employee turnover and increased plant quality, it was a clear win for us. We couldn’t be happier with the results.

The HV-100 plant moving robots perform a wide variety of plant handling tasks such as spacing, consolidation, and collection. The robots require minimal training to operate and are flexible to deploy in a wide range of bed and plant configurations on all common ground surfaces.

A recent partnership with SBI Software and their SBI Grower product, an enterprise production software system for the nursery and greenhouse industry, enables a cloud-based data collection system which lets the robots line the work that is being performed and reports this information back to growers and production planners to provide a comprehensive view of the work robots have completed and are in the process of doing.

UPDATE 1/21/2014: An even more recent partnership with Practical Software Solutions, a provider of ERP and back office accounting software, will enable Harvest Automation to connect robot data with the Sage ERP package from Practical to develop integrated production and optimization tools for the user. The new partnership was announced today.

For more information about the system, see: 
Harvey: A working robot for container crops
Robots Podcast: Harvest automation

Link to audio file (27:16)

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley speaks with David Dorhout from Iowa State University about his Agricultural Robots that include Prospero the robot farmer and Aquarius the greenhouse watering robot.

Today’s agricultural equipment has been designed around a single farmer controlling large machinery. This method has its drawbacks since farming decisions have to be made at the level of the field. Nature instead is chaotic and dynamic, soil nutrients and moisture change from foot to foot. A swarm of small robots like Prospero would have the ability to farm inch by inch, examining the soil before planting each seed and choosing the best variety for that spot. Ideally, this would maximize the productivity of each acre, allow less land to be converted to farm land, and ultimately feed more people.

Prospero is the working prototype of an Autonomous Micro Planter (AMP) that uses a combination of swarm and game theory to plant seeds at safe distances from one another.

Dorhout’s second agricultural robot Aquarius is a greenhouse robot that autonomously waters plants using its 30 gallon tank. The robot is programed using taping on the ground of the greenhouse.

David Dorhout
David Dorhout is a graduate of Iowa State University. He has always been interested in robotics and has 14 years of experience in the agriculture and biotech industry doing field and greenhouse discovery work. He is the founder of Dorhout R&D LLC which is a research and development business designing and building novel robotic systems and interactive consumer electronic devices.

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• David Dorhout’s Website

Link to audio file (31:48)

In this episode Sabine Hauert speaks with Jorge Heraud, CEO of California-based startup Blue River Technology which brings together computer vision and robotics to automate agriculture. Their first robot LettuceBot targets the state’s #1 vegetable crop. Its task is to thin rows of lettuce in fields. This involves selectively removing some of the plants by spraying excess fertilizer on them, thereby avoiding overcrowding while fertilizing nearby plants. The tractor-mounted robot is already being rented out to farms across the state.

Heraud tells us about the challenges in robot vision and the rapid growth of Blue River Technology. He shares his hopes to apply their technology to other tasks in agriculture, and crops with different vision challenges. Finally he explains how this technology will transform the classical workforce on farms.

Jorge Heraud
Jorge Heraud is CEO of Blue River Technology. Before co-founding the company with Lee Redden, a fellow graduate student at Stanford University, Heraud worked in precision agriculture as Director of Business Development at Trimble Navigation. At Stanford he completed an MBA at the Graduate School of Business.

Links:

• Download mp3 (14.7MB)
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• Blue River Technology

If you liked this article, you may also be interested in:

• Robots Podcast: FutureDairy
• Robots: Zero Tillage Robotics
• Harvey: A working robot for container crops
• Matching technology to value creation: Drones in agriculture
• UAV innovation is in the Cloud; 3 precision Ag innovations to watch for in 2014

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Link to audio file (38:51)

FutureDairy is an R&D development program to help Australian dairy farmers manage the challenges they are likely to face during the next 20 years. In this episode, Ron Vanderkley speaks with the project lead Kendra Kerrisk from the University of Sydney about robotic milking and herding.

As one of the big challenges is the availability of labor and associated lifestyle issues in the dairy industry, FutureDairy’s focus is on automatic milking systems. While robotic milking technology is now in wide use overseas, there’s less experience with automatic milking in grazing-based farming systems such as in Australia. The video below summarizes some of the results from the DeLaval pilot farm in Australia.

With increasing numbers of Australian dairy cows now being milked by robots, researchers are looking at a range of exciting ways to use robots on the farm. One that has already shown promise is the use of robots (UGV) to herd cattle from the paddock to the dairy. In the videos below you can see two trials with the Shrimp rover hearding cows in Australian farms.

FutureDairy 3 is sponsored by Dairy Australia, the University of Sydney, the NSW Department of Primary Industries and DeLaval.

Kendra Kerrisk
Kendra Kerrisk is Faculty of Veterinary Science at the The University of Sydney in Australia. Kerrisk developed a strong interest for the Dairy Industry whilst conducting undergraduate and post-graduate studies at Massey University in New Zealand and has remained a leader in the field since then. During her PhD at the University of Melbourne she studied Peri-parturient Management for Large Dairy Herds using Controlled Breeding Programmes. After her PhD, she worked for Dexcel (formerly Dairying Research Corporation) in New Zealand on the world’s first pasture-based Automatic Milking System research farm. Through her academic life, she has contributed significantly to the national and international knowledge regarding application of Automatic Milking Systems (AMS) with pasture-based dairying. One of the highlights of the work conducted within FutureDairy, a project which she leads, has been the co-development of the world’s first Robotic Rotary (Automatic Milking Rotary, DeLaval AMRTM). This internationally recognized work will increase the feasibility of robotic milking for large dairy herds that are more common within the Australian and New Zealand industries.

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• The FutureDairy Project
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The Distributed Robotics Garden, a project of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory, CSAIL, MIT.

There’s much more to agricultural robotics than aerial systems, of course. There are already GPS-guided auto-steering systems on the ground that, when installed on tractors, assure complete coverage of fields with a minimum of overlap from one pass to the next while relieving stress on the generally still-present human operators they may one day replace. This same technology is finding its way into combine harvesters and other large, self-propelled equipment, enabling them to complete their tasks more quickly, using less fuel and reducing waste.

Application of chemicals metered according to need will further reduce waste, and robotic planters are already producing more even stands using less seed. In milking parlors, robots are taking over the tedious, noisome, and somewhat dangerous job of milking cows. Robots that tend vineyards and orchards, pruning and mowing between vines and picking apples, are either already available or well along in their development. Moreover, under pressure from labor shortages, efforts are underway to mechanize or automate labor-intensive aspects of the production and handling of a wide range of speciality crops, from asparagus to strawberries, if not in the field then in preparing the produce for shipment.

Two alternative approaches to the application of robotics to agriculture are hidden in these developments:

1. The robotic control of heavy equipment in field operations: This is essentially an extrapolation of what’s happening at present, but executed with greater precision.
2. Robotic replacement for hand labor: The level of detail required in mapping and manipulation the environment opens the possibility of a new, robotics-intensive approach, initially enabling better practices in the raising of speciality crops, but eventually scaling to replace the methods currently used on large acreages. This robotics-intensive approach is a scenario that involves both significant investment and significant disruption as it scales upward to larger areas and staple crops with thinner margins.

The simple extrapolation approach doesn’t alter the fundamental nature of agriculture as it is commonly practiced. It treats robotics as an add-on or substitute rather than as a transformative opportunity. The obvious risks, involving investment in engineering and in purchasing equipment, while significant for those immediately involved, are finite, estimable, and almost entirely financial in nature. The rewards are similarly modest: for equipment manufacturers, it amounts to keeping up with competitors; for farmers, there may be a slight improvement in margins and maybe a little more time to spend not sitting on a tractor.

The hidden risks with this approach are longer term, and relate to the perpetuation of agriculture as currently practiced, with all of the environmental and nutritional problems that implies. A robotic tractor is still a tractor, compressing the soil over which it passes, necessitating tillage to re-loosen it, consuming energy and exposing the soil to erosion and accelerated mineralization, and reducing its ability to supply nutrients to plants and its ability to absorb and retain water. With a rising human population and finite arable land, the risks of using this approach include the possibility of widespread malnutrition and more frequent famine.

The robotics-intensive approach, which I like to term Cultibotics, but which I’ll simply refer to as ‘robotic gardening’ here, leverages robotics in order to transform current agricultural practice. To accomplish this, the machinery must become autonomous so that a single farmer can oversee the simultaneous operation of many machines. The one-to-one correspondence between operator and machine has driven the increasing size and power of tractors and other machinery, and breaking that correspondence is a necessary first step toward a robotics-intensive approach. Given autonomous machines, and the resulting possibility of operating many of them, the use of much smaller, lighter machines becomes an option. If these machines are also capable of dextrous or otherwise detailed manipulation, an altogether different approach to agriculture becomes possible: one based on the best practices of gardening, applied on a grand scale.

If you’re having trouble imagining what I’m referring to here, consider the Telegarden.

The Telegarden, as installed at Ars Electronica, 1995-2004, Photo courtesy of Ken Goldberg

The Telegarden wasn’t autonomous; rather it was remotely operated by many people in succession. It also wasn’t light or mobile, as it used a pivoting industrial robotic arm to perform all operations. It wasn’t even a particularly serious attempt at gardening, since there was no overall design or production goals driving the planting decisions. What it did was to demonstrate that a robot can perform the physical tasks necessary to maintain a garden. Gardening robots could come in various sizes, some larger and some smaller, could be mobile, and could operate autonomously under the direction of a coordinating system, itself guided by a plan created by the gardener or farmer.
Because they could do their work in a detailed fashion, planting one seed at a time, or pulling one weed at a time, instead of moving soil around in bulk, and because they could have the luxury of operating continuously (24/7 if need be) instead of having to race to get the job done quickly, their power requirements would be modest — well within the bounds of what could be supplied by device-mounted solar arrays and/or on-site wind generators — and the need for energy storage could be minimized by saving operations requiring less power for the nighttime. Some of this technology is already in development, but the preponderance of the work remains to be done, which is to say that there are still many ‘ground floor’ opportunities available: designing gardening techniques suitable to robots, developing hardware to perform those techniques and platforms upon which to mount that hardware, and software to drive it all, both at the device level and for the coordinating system.

Obviously there are risks in this scenario as well: the cost and time required to develop the technology, and then additional time to ramp up production and gradually replace existing equipment. By the time this has been done, some other solution, perhaps the cultivation of algae in water-filled glass tubes, might be well on its way to replacing agriculture altogether. There’s also the risk that only a small percentage of farmers will be willing to give up familiar practices to take advantage of the new technology and the new approach it enables, and a risk that some corporations will choose to resist the change rather than adapt to it.

The benefits, on the other hand, potentially include: the transformation of a monoculture-dominated landscape into a huge garden; reduced reliance on petroleum-based products; improved diets through the extension of mechanization to crops like tomatoes, peppers, strawberries, etc. (making them more affordable); dramatically reduced loss of soil to erosion; reduction of agriculture’s contribution to CO2 production and reversal of the loss of soil carbon, helping to soak up some of the extra CO2 already in the atmosphere; increased system resilience for a more robust response to climate change; and increased respect, and a far more interesting livelihood, for farmers.

For the companies and investors who take the financial risks to bring this about, because much of the savings in reduced fuel and chemical use become available for equipment purchases, there is the potential for a huge payoff.

For society at large, there’s also the economic stimulus of a new industry, one with the subtlety to bring technology to bear in the service of soil fertility, sustainability, and biodiversity, as well as the production of food and other plant-sourced products.

As guest speaker for a CMURobotics RI Seminar, titled Lessons Learned Bootstrapping a Robotic Vehicle Company, Mel Torrie of Autonomous Solutions (Petersboro, Utah), describes how he got into robotics in the first place, why he made the jump from academia to a startup, how that startup survived their “near-death experience”, what the company has been doing since, and what he’s learned along the way. There is a strong agricultural theme, both in his original motivation and in the history and current operation of Autonomous Solutions.

View on YouTube

Mel Torrie was recently interviewed by Robots Podcast

Together with Professor Maurice Maloney, Director of Rothamsted Research, David Gardner, CEO of The Royal Agricultural Society of England, speaking with Charlotte Smith of the BBC R4’s Farming Today, for the January 5th edition of Farming Today This Week, covering the 2013 Oxford Farming Conference (held Jan. 2nd-4th on the campus of Oxford University), had this to say on the morning of the last day of the conference:

I think engineering has a huge amount to offer. We’ve seen a huge growth in the last decade or so in terms of precision farming on arable farms, so the whole concept of measuring in detail what we are doing on an individual field basis, and indeed within parts of fields, that gives us the opportunity firstly to reduce inputs, so for example we can identify which parts of the field need particular fertilizer, and just applying them to that part of the field. We can identify which parts of the field need particular weed killers and apply them just to that part of the field, rather than applying them to the field as a whole. And today I’m going to talk, and it will be quite controversial at the conference, I think, but I’m going to talk about relatively small, light-weight gantries that are autonomous, that don’t have a driver on them.

And a bit further on…

A farm in 1980 looked nothing like a farm in 1945. Now I think the really exciting thing is that a farm in the middle part of this century will look nothing like a farm does today. I think we will see much less pesticide use. I don’t think it will be eliminated completely, but I think there will be a lot less pesticide use, a lot less fertilizer use, and I think we’ll see mechanization that is just completely different, with the sort of autonomous machines that I’ve talked about, and robots doing things like picking apples and picking strawberries in the landscape – just completely different from what we do today – and I wish I was starting my career again, because I think it’s going to be immensely exciting.

Professor Maloney agrees…

The idea of different technologies interdigitating and solving a problem is key to this. Robotization is something that will happen in agriculture. It’s already happening in Santa Clara County in the U.S., weeding lettuce fields it’s entirely done by robotization now, but robots are not inconsistent with a very benign, bucolic environment, and in fact it would give opportunities to farmers to spend more time thinking about the rest of the environmental considerations that they would like to contribute to but simply don’t have the time because they’re doing mundane activities.

The recording is available from the iTunes store. Begin at 12 min 30 sec, or, for better context, at 10 min 30 sec.

You might wonder why I want to turn land management over to robots. Is it because I’m such a geek that I think everything goes better with robots? No, not really. Sure, I think the technology is cool, but I’m not eager to factor human beings altogether out of any activity, not even those that are dull, dirty, and/or dangerous.

I am, however, eager to see the benefits of replacing methods designed to spread a human operator’s time as thinly as possible with methods which reintroduce attention to detail to plant cultivation. Granted, that attention would, for the most part, be provided by robotic sensors, processors, and algorithms, but that has an upside as well as a downside.

The downside is mainly that it’s unfamiliar and we don’t know whether we can trust it. The upside is that robots aren’t limited to human senses, but can go as far beyond them as available technology will support, providing information not directly available to us, and they also aren’t limited to the time a human operator can afford to invest, provided they are capable of autonomous operation. Potentially this means that instead of a single machine running 40-60 hours per week, you can have many machines running 24/7, vastly increasing the available machine time per land area.

Combine that rich sensory information and machine time availability with manipulators capable of performing basic gardening operations (planting, weeding, pruning, harvesting, saving seed, …) and you have a platform justifying the effort to develop higher level software which supervises beneficial plant combinations in space (polyculture) and time (crop rotation), which is capable of mixing annuals with perennials (permaculture), which makes room for native plants (particularly those that are threatened or endangered), which also makes room for animals without allowing them to ruin crops, and which can make sure there are enough flowers, throughout the season, to keep pollinators healthy.

Such a system could also learn from experience, even setting up intentional experiments, maintain the genetic diversity of crops, and accelerate the creation of new strains in response to changing conditions. It could also provide exquisitely detailed information in support of operation management.

Technology of this sort would make for a far more varied and interesting landscape (biodiversity) and greater variety of production (diversified income), supporting a more well balanced diet for those dependent upon it. It could also dramatically reduce the energy and other inputs used in crop production, all but eliminate soil erosion and the airborne dust and stream contamination that result, reverse the loss of organic matter in the soil (improving its water absorption and retention and contributing to the sequestration of atmospheric carbon), save many endangered species from the brink of extinction, and bring the practice of agriculture into parity with other aspects of the modern world in its sophistication and the respect it commands, helping to enhance rural culture.

So, yes, that would be very cool technology, but it’s really about all of the benefits that could be realized through its widespread deployment.

He begins with Simon Blackmore, of Harper Adams University College, who tells us about robotic technologies that have already found their way into new tractors, implements, and combine harvesters. Blackmore also discusses the energetics of cultivation, saying “Why do we plough? Mainly to repair the damage that we have caused with big tractors. Up to 80 per cent of the energy going into cultivation is there to repair this damage.” He proposes an altogether different approach, using light-weight, autonomous machines. Crow summarizes the requirements list for these machines thusly: “These agribots need to have three key abilities: to navigate, to interpret the scene in front of them, and to be able to help the farmer, by blasting a weed, applying a chemical or harvesting the crop.”

Addressing the first of these requirements, navigation, Crow moves on to Germany, to mention Arno Ruckelshausen of the University of Applied Sciences in Osnabrück, who is developing RTK-GPS, a geolocation technology with a resolution of 2 cm, for BoniRob, a four-wheeled rover that also uses spectral imaging to distinguish green plants from brown soil, and which remembers the location of individual plants and returns repeatedly to each to monitor their growth. Ruckelshausen also intends to equip BoniRob with a precision chemical application system based on ink-jet printer technology, which would apply microdots of pesticide directly to the leaves of weeds. For those averse to using herbiicides in any amounts, Crow mentions flame guns and lasers as alternative methods of weed control. He also goes into the use of a similar approach for fertilizer, using sensors to gauge how much is needed by individual plants and supplying only that much.

The next stopping off point is Australia, where Salah Sukkarieh, of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, makes the point that funding is relatively abundant for mining and defense projects, but relatively paltry for agricultural robotics, meaning that difficult problems like machine vision will have to be worked out first for other applications first and then reapplied to agriculture. Evenso, he predicts machine vision systems will be available in approximately three years.

Crow makes a quick side-trip back to Europe to mention the HortiBot, another four-wheeled field rover that already uses machine vision to identify weeds and apply chemicals to them.

Then on to Japan, a country with an aging population that currently only produces 40% of the food it consumes. Despite the shrinking labor pool, the government of Japan hopes to reduce their dependency on foreign imports by increasing the amount grown domestically to 50%. To accomplish this, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries has tapped Noboru Noguchi of Hokkaido University to lead a 5-year, $8 million effort to automate all aspects of the cultivation and harvesting of rice, wheat, and soya, and to bring this machinery to market by 2014.

Continuing with the theme of a shrinking labor pool, Crow quotes Eldert (E.J.) van Henten of Wageningen University, The Netherlands, as saying “Work in agriculture is not interesting, prestigious or usually very well paid. It is physically demanding and dirty. People prefer to go to the cities and work in factories or in office jobs. While the population is growing and needs to be fed, a rapidly shrinking number of people are willing to work in agriculture.”

I presume Henten was referring to hired farm laborers rather than to farmers, but even farmers may soon be in short supply. BBC Radio’s Farming Today has recently conducted several interviews with people involved in various aspects of agriculture, in which the interviewees have expressed concern that they don’t see a new generation of farmers ready to take the places of their elders.

Crow next dives into the economics, beginning with the California raisin industry, which, after being squeezed by a price-crash following a bumper harvest in 2000, began adopting a mechanical harvester adapted from a machine used to harvest ripe grapes for wine. By 2007 almost half of California’s raisins were being harvested mechanically. Generally speaking, the use of robots can reduce costs for field operations such as weeding, even after factoring in the cost of machinery and maintenance. One Danish study of organic farming concluded that agribots could reduce the cost of weeding by half.

This article strikes me as being reasonably well-researched, if perhaps a bit simplistic. I see some familiar names. On the other hand, there is no mention of Integrated Pest Management, in which biological control methods are used to reduce the need for chemical pesticides, and for the practice of which autonomous machines could certainly provide assistance. There is also no mention of the significant advantage to be gained, for example in crop breeding, from the generation of detailed, plant-by-plant growth records, nor of the potential for making use of robots to replace monoculture with intense polycultures, including mixtures of deep-rooted perennials and annuals. But comprehensive or not, it’s good to see such an article appearing in a publication like New Scientist Magazine, and I’m grateful to Mr. Crow for having gone to the trouble.

Reposted from Cultibotics.

Link to audio file (29:22)

Link to transcript

In this episode, we talk to Salah Sukkarieh, Director of Research and Innovation at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR). He gives us an overview of the centre’s past and present projects, many addressing the special conditions robotics faces in Australia.

Salah Sukkarieh

Salah Sukkarieh is the Director of Research and Innovation of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR) and the Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Sydney in the School of Aerospace. He received his Honours in BE Mechatronics Engineering in 1997 and his PhD in 2000 at the University of Sydney.

Field robotics focuses on systems that work in outdoor environments. Having been the principal research and development lead on many of the autonomous systems projects, Sukkarieh tells us about work done at the ACFR in aerospace, aviation, agriculture, mining and autonomous transport. Given the ripeness of the field, he also tells us about remaining future work and the potential for collaborations with industry.

For more information, visit the centre’s youtube channel.

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University of Colorado Assistant Professor Nikolaus Correll, speaking at TEDx Front Range earlier this year, outlined his vision for transforming agriculture through robotic cultivation.

(Correll Lab at the University of Colorado)

This will be the 10th edition of the Field Robot Event. Organized by Fontys University of Applied Sciences and Wageningen UR (University & Research), it will be held in Venlo, The Netherlands, on the grounds of Floriade 2012.

(PDF of slides from above presentation video about the 2012 Field Robot Event)

The application of field robotics to agriculture is an emerging area of interest for our researchers. The increasing demands on our agricultural sector are forcing farmers to consider robotic assistance where before they worked alone. In recent years GPS guided tractors have become commercially available and are now seen commonly in many countries in the world. These systems still rely on the farmer to supervise them – normally from tractor’s cab. It is hoped that the next generation of farm robots will be more aware of their immediate surroundings and will be capable of mapping obstacles and navigating autonomously. Unlike field robotics in other domains such as mining or the military (where safety and the removal of people from hazardous situations is a major driver), agricultural robotics will only make sense when the business case means that using robots will save money when compared to farming in a traditional manner.

Corn (maize) is a good example of a crop for which these conventional measures of productivity tell a story of brilliant progress, with the result that corn is cheap enough to use not only as livestock feed, to be converted into meat and dairy products, but as the feedstock for production of ethanol for fuel, competing with fuels refined from petroleum pumped from the ground, rather remarkable considering that corn kernels represent only a small fraction of the biomass of a corn plant and that fermentation and distillation aren’t particularly efficient processes.

Crops that fair less well by these measures include many vegetables and most fruits, which have been becoming gradually more expensive, especially as compared with grains that are easily handled mechanically, but even compared with meat and dairy products from grain-fed livestock. One major consequence of this has been that people generally consume more grains, meat, and dairy products, and less fruit and vegetables than they once did, before the mechanization juggernaut got started and while vegetable gardens were still common.

So, by an altogether different measure, how healthy the average diet is, mechanization has been a disaster, so far. I say “so far” because the essential problem is that, so far, mechanization has favored crops consisting of hard, dry seeds, that are easily handled in bulk, making other crops needed for a balanced diet relatively less affordable. In happier economic times this would matter less, as people would simply pay the premium for a healthier diet, but the times being what they are people are scrimping however they can, including with the food they consume.

There are other ways of measuring productivity: energy use*, soil gain or loss*, water use and contamination*, and the degree to which a given practice denies space to native flora and habitat to native fauna. By any of these measures, conventional mechanization comes out looking at least shortsighted if not dimwitted. *(per unit produced)

So is the answer to turn back the clock on agricultural technology, to replace the plow with the hoe and the drill with the planting stick? I’m not prepared to make that argument – although I’ve no doubt others would – aside from noting that gardens are a better use of many urban spaces than are lawns, and there is no further need for rural communities to supply cities with cheap labor, since those cities are already well supplied, and many rural areas suffer from depopulation.

Instead, my position is that we need to take mechanization to the next level, replacing dumb machines suited only to bulk operations with smart machines capable of performing well-informed, detailed manipulations, for example controlling weeds by selectively pulling them from the ground or pest caterpillars by picking them from plants (unless they’ve already been parasitized, as by wasps) rather than by applying poisons.

Given machinery with an adequate array of sensors and a sufficiently broad range of optional actions, applying best practices becomes a matter of mating these with processing power connected to an expert system, and of programming.

It gets better, because the same system that works the land can be used to improve the expert system through experimentation and, in routine operation, by accumulation of data to which statistical methods can be applied, and can also be used to improve the crops themselves, as for instance by leaving the best formed, most insect resistant cabbages to go to seed.

The bottom line is that this approach can make available the mechanical equivalent of an attentive expert gardener, at a cost, given predictable economies of scale, that would make possible the wholesale replacement of conventional, traction-based machinery and methods with more adaptable machinery bringing a whole new repertoire of methods to bear, one far better suited to the production of the fruits and vegetables that have been becoming unaffordable under the current regime.

As for the other measures of productivity mentioned above, such machinery, since it wouldn’t need to turn soil in bulk and could operate long hours without continuous supervision, would consume energy at a relatively low rate, suitable for supply from solar panels or via the grid from renewable sources. It could operate through continuous ground cover, all but eliminating soil loss, and with minimal use or complete non-use of herbicides and pesticides, reducing soil and water contamination. Ground cover, mulch, and the humus accumulating from decaying roots can also reduce the need for irrigation, and the ability to create local varieties through seed selection based on the health of maturing plants can further reduce it, as well as helping to adapt more quickly to climate change. Making room for native species, something that can only be accomplished in conventional practice by leaving land completely undisturbed, becomes a matter of programming the system to leave certain species alone, wherever it finds them, even to the extent of tolerating some crop loss to native fauna, and to leave anything it can’t identify alone until it can be identified.

Such machinery might not be able to compete with conventional practice in the production of corn and other bulk commodities, at least to start with, but it also wouldn’t consume prodigious amounts of petroleum-based fuels. Moreover, development and rapid deployment of such machinery would drive the growth of a new, potentially domestic industry, one that would also work to the benefit of materials recycling efforts, more efficient transportation, and on and on.

The R-word I haven’t yet mentioned is robotics. While such machines probably aren’t what most people first think of when robots are mentioned, their creation and production falls squarely within the discipline of robotics, composed as they would necessarily be from robotic technologies.

Reposted from Lacy Ice + Heat, via Cultibotics.

Link to audio file (28:29)

In today’s show, we take you all the way to Brazil. Marcelo Becker from the University of São Paulo (USP) talks to us about how mobile robots are going to help change agriculture, manufacturing and driving in his country. We then speak with Marcel de Sena Dall’Agnol a student at USP about the excellent robotics competition they organized at SEMATRON, which is a mechatronics conference organized by USP undergraduates.

Marcelo Becker

Marcelo Becker is Professor at the University of São Paulo, one of the top universities in Brazil. He directs the Mobile Robotics Lab that aims towards real-world applications with potential positive impact. His projects focus on agricultural mobile robots, educational robots, intelligent warehouses forklifts, quadrotors and autonomous cars with partner FIAT. More broadly, Becker discusses the growing interest for robotics in Brazil, public perception and the future of the field.

Before joining USP, Becker was Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais (PUC Minas) where he was also the co-head of the Mechatronics Engineering Department and of the Robotics and Automation Group (GEAR). He also was visiting Professor at the Autonomous System Lab (ASL) at the EPFL in 2006.

Marcel de Sena Dall’Agnol

Marcel is a third year student in EECS at the University of Sao Paolo. This year he was one of the organizers of SEMATRON VII, a week-long series of activities directed towards students in Mechatronic Engineering in São Carlos and nearby cities. During the week, students at the University of São Paulo have their lessons suspended in order to fully participate in the event which offers lectures, courses, a cultural activity and technical visits to companies. The event is one of the largest of the kind in Brazil, with around 500 participants. Internationally renowned companies such as FIAT, National Instruments, Embraer and Petrobrás have sponsored the event in past editions.

In this interview, we will be talking about one of the main attractions, the robotics competition. During the one-day event, students gather around robotic kits made by local company PNCA. The kits let students build robots from scratch and come with an easy-to-use programming interface. The task this year, inspired from the Fukushima disaster, was to retrieve victims from a nuclear power plant while avoiding hazards.

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If your goal is to maximize the production of those crops that are easily produced and handled in bulk and survive long-term storage well, in the interest of generating return on capital investment and foreign exchange, and only care about how it’s done insofar as that impacts the bottom line, you might conclude that capital expenditures to further minimize payroll would generally not be cost effective, that it would cost more to replace the remaining workforce than to keep it.

However, if you’re interested in guaranteeing the sustainability of production far into the future, despite climate change, while also halting soil loss, ending the use of poisons, preserving remaining diversity in both crop and native genomes, and rebalancing production for healthier diets, you may need both more sophisticated machinery and all the people you can recruit.

Such a complicated goal implies complex operations, and complex operations imply a large variety of tasks, some easily mechanized and others common enough to make mechanization worthwhile, even though challenging. Those that are neither common nor easily mechanized will fall to human workers, farmers and farmhands, who are far more adaptable than any machine.

At some point in the future it may become possible to build machines adaptable enough to take the place of a farmer, but until the annual cost of ownership of such a machine drops below the annual cost of one human worker, it won’t make economic sense to deploy them, and without an infrastructure to drive down the cost of robotics, that may never happen.

Link to audio file (26:01)

In today’s episode we look at a new market in robotics with huge potential, agriculture. With us, Joe Jones, co-founder of Harvest Automation and father of the Roomba.

In addition, you might have noted that we’re starting the new year with an upgrade to our website. Our partner, robots.net, will now provide us with news. You can access each episode’s news items, along with many others, via the website’s new NEWS tab, which replaces the former Forum. We think that this will increase both the quality and accessibility of our news content, and look forward to your comments in the improved comments section under each post.

Joseph Jones

Joe Jones is a robotics visionary with 24 years in the field. As proof, he was the first employee of iRobot, where he invented the Roomba that has sold over 3 million units. He also spent 9 years in robotic research at the MIT AI Lab, authored three books on robotics, and holds 15 patents. Today we have him on our show to talk about Harvest Automation, company that he co-founded with a team of robotics experts and ex-iRobot employees. Tapping into the huge agriculture market, Harvest will start by deploying thousands of robots to nurse potted plants. To give you an idea, here’s a short video.

The nice thing with agriculture robots is that incremental improvements to the robot can open a huge range of new applications. With that in mind, Harvest hopes to eventually deploy robots in real fields, doing all the large-scale dirty work challenging today’s farmers.

Finally, Jones also gives us a glimpse at the market and some of his secrets to bridge the gap between academia and business.

Links:

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• Harvest Automation’s Homepage

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My interest is in improving agricultural practice, and I think robotics presents the approach most likely to serve that end, really the only approach with any chance of widespread success. (For me, robotic tractors are merely annoying, except as they help generate experience with autonomous navigation in an uncontrolled environment, applicable to other systems.)

Conversely, agriculture may be the largest potential market for robotics [in terms of revenue], one so large that it could drive the development of self-reconfiguring, self-reproducing robotic factories. This depends on the total cost of operation using robotic devices coming in below the total cost of operation using conventional methods, which includes increasingly expensive fuel for tractors (which might be replaced by solar-generated electricity in the robotic scenario).

I’m very encouraged to see robotics finally gathering momentum, and have hope that some of that momentum will find its way towards radically transforming agriculture.

Reposted from Cultibotics.

Granted that it’s far easier to create such a program for a machine intended to vend beverage cans than for one intended to plant, tend, and harvest a mixture of crops in an uncontrolled, nonuniform environment. The latter is harder, but not impossible, nor even so far beyond some other tasks to which computers have already been put, such as handling a complex mix of financial transactions or handling the control surfaces of an otherwise unstable aircraft.

Plants have numerous characteristics which, if not already known, are at least measurable. Soils likewise can be measured and typed. Weather is the most unpredictable factor, but even weather is regular enough to be categorized as a climate, and statistical approaches allow decisions to be made in the face of unknowables, which on average work out well enough. It’s a complex context, but not unmanageably so.

Thankfully, it isn’t necessary that any such system perform perfectly. It’s only necessary, as an initial condition, that it either perform on par with conventional practice while costing less, or outperform conventional practice while costing about the same.

This becomes easier with each passing year, as the cost of diesel fuel and other petroleum-based agricultural inputs steadily rises, and as the power of computing equipment and the sophistication of programming tools improve.

The rising cost of petroleum works against conventional practice and for a dramatically different approach utilizing robotics because conventional practice is utterly dependent upon huge amounts of fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides, whereas robotics can make possible an alternative approach without those dependencies.

The alternative approach itself is as old as gardening. Robotics can make this approach a contender by duplicating the knowledge, skills, and hands of the gardener many times over, making it applicable to land areas measured in hundreds or thousands of acres instead of square feet. That’s where the distinction between a robot and other types of machines comes in. A robot is a machine with a brain of its own. Robots can operate autonomously, meaning there doesn’t have to be a human operator present and you don’t need as many human operators as you have machines.

That’s an essential point. It’s the one-to-one correspondence between operator and machine that has shaped conventional practice, exerting upward pressure on the size and power of the machines as economics exerted upward pressure on the amount of land required to earn a decent income. And large, powerful machines are only really useful for conducting operations that are applied uniformly over entire fields. The result is mile after mile of fields, all planted to the same crop at very nearly the same time.

Breaking that one-to-one correspondence is the key to breaking the dependence on oil, while at the same time dramatically increasing the variety of production and relieving the oppressive monotony that has so overtaken the rural American landscape.

And the key to breaking that correspondence is machines with enough brains to operate autonomously.

Reposted from Cultibotics.

Without a transformational vision, more than parsimonious transformation is unlikely to result.

I aim to provide such a vision, and to help connect and empower those who find themselves enlivened by it.

This vision is about fusing ecological reasoning into every aspect of the technology employed to conduct land management, specifically including the management of land engaged in agricultural production.

That creating such a technology is possible is beyond reasonable doubt, but whether the resources to do so will be brought to bear in a timely manner, and whether that technology will find a clear path to widespread adoption, are far less certain.

It may require that we demand [or conjure] it into existence.

Reposted from Cultibotics.

Before responding to that question, let me turn it around. Why, given that there are no laws preventing them from doing so, are so few people in the ‘modern world’ engaged in by-hand cultivation, or even cultivation using draft animals?

One big reason is that land isn’t free, and the cheapest land is located far from city markets, as well as from the amenities cities provide. And, even if there were still land for homesteading, there’s the matter of potable water, housing, tools, seed, food enough to last until the first crops come in, canning supplies and equipment if part of that crop has to last through the winter, and some means of transporting a portion of the crop to market. If you’re growing one of the local commodity crops, you can almost leave off the transportation part, since there will already be a network in place for that purpose, and you’ll only need to move your crop as far as the nearest node in that network, but you’ll also be competing with other producers benefitting from economies of scale for the thin margins they’re accustomed to. If, on the other hand, you’re growing watermelons in wheat country, you’ll have to provide your own transportation.

Okay, back to the original question, why robots, given that there are people in need of work?

People are slow. One person can just about manage five acres by hand, if they work at it full time. Depending on the climate and what’s being grown, that might be enough to feed as many as twenty, or at least provide them with vegetables, which isn’t such a bad consumer/producer ratio, but it’s far lower than the average for conventional agriculture. One person using the sort of equipment you see everywhere in rural America, can work between 600 and 1,000 acres, planted to crops like wheat or soybeans that lend themselves to bulk handling.

People are expensive. Who’s going to pay the unemployed to produce by hand a small fraction of what is already being produced far more cheaply by means of machines under direct human control? Even if the current cost of production were to rise several fold, current practice would still result in cheaper food than what workers earning minimum wage could produce by hand. Granted that the economics are better for crops that don’t lend themselves to linear mechanization (performing field operations while/by moving over the surface), and that a diet limited to those that do would be significantly impoverished.

People are lazy have other priorities. And well they should! (Personally, I’m a fan of Bucky Fuller’s idea of paying people, modestly, to go to school. They benefit by becoming more marketable, and society benefits through an increase in the skill-level of its workforce.)

People would [still] be needed. A conversion from tractors to small, autonomous machines [applying horticultural techniques] almost certainly would not result in a net displacement of workers, rather the reverse, and you’re more likely to find enough people (4..8, at a guess) willing to maintain (and augment*) the machines that manage a square mile of land than you are to find enough people (about 100) willing to work that land by hand.

*(Especially at first, it’s unlikely that robots would be able to do everything that needed to be done, and the gaps in their capabilities would have to be supplied otherwise, most likely by people.)

Reposted from Cultibotics.

Well, so be it, for now. There is good work being done, and as the variety of off-the-shelf robotic parts continues to increase, the power/price of computer equipment continues to rise steeply, and the economics of current agricultural practice continues to degenerate with rising costs for fuel and other inputs, the scene is gradually being set for a profound transformation in the way we use land to produce food, fiber, and plant materials for the production of synthetic fuels.

There is a danger that we won’t get serious about that transformation until the breakdown of current practice is far enough along to cause serious disruption and pain. There is also danger that robotics will first be used to put off real change as long as possible, by simply displacing what few humans remain in an otherwise essentially unchanged system.

On the other hand, there is plenty of opportunity to go around, especially for those who get in on the ground floor and develop the necessary technology to augment generic robotics and create energy-efficient machines designed to perform detailed management of productive land in ways that enhance fertility and repair ecological damage.

The demand for agricultural production isn’t going to go away, but we can dramatically change and radically improve the way we go about meeting it, with a far greater return on the R&D dollar than, for example, missile-bearing robotic helicopters.

Reposted from Cultibotics.