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cultibotics
Valuing the work done
John Payne
10 Jan 2009
So long as the alternative to the use of robotics remains human labor, the value of the work a machine does can be measured in terms of what it would cost to pay people to do the same work, plus the g...
Robots under glass: The threshold of minimal investment
John Payne
04 Jan 2009
For the time being, it probably doesn't make good economic sense to dedicate sophisticated machinery to managing a patch of ground that's unprotected from the elements, when it might just as well be w...
No one’s going to take your tractor away
John Payne
25 Nov 2008
Even if, between now and January, Congress were to get religion with regard to the benefits to be gained from applying robotics to the transformation of agriculture, and had a full-speed-ahead bill re...
The importance of interfaces
John Payne
24 Nov 2008
Take the USB port as an example. It's ubiquitous; practically everything either has one or plugs into one.
Similarly, if you want to build a multi-vendor market for almost anything, one of t...
Finding a place for cultibotics in Obama’s rural agenda
John Payne
23 Nov 2008
It's not like there was any shortage of ideas for how to improve the stability of U.S. agriculture, the lot of farmers, and the economic vitality of rural America. Just have a look at President-Elect...
More specifically, how would they work?
John Payne
22 Nov 2008
This a subject for research and development, of course, but it's my ‘job’ to make this vision as accessible as I can, to both anticipate what that R&D might produce and describe it in plain langua...
Imagine a machine built for efficient gardening
John Payne
18 Nov 2008
What would it look like? How would it be powered, and how would it transmit power to the parts that need it? What actions would it be capable of performing?
There's no single, right answer ...
Center-pivot tillage system
John Payne
27 Oct 2008
Thanks to Jan Slinsky for posting this YouTube link, to a video showing a center-pivot system used for tilling a small plot of land.
While requiring more energy than tillage-free management w...
The origin of cultibotics in science fiction
John Payne
26 Aug 2008
To be quite truthful, the dream of having robots take over the task of managing productive land isn't really mine in the sense of having originated it. To be sure I've contributed some detail, but ot...
An idea the time for which is growing closer
John Payne
25 Aug 2008
When I first started thinking about the use of sophisticated robotics on the front line of horticulture/agriculture, performing most or all field operations autonomously, in a detailed manner, I figur...
WSIC: Knowing the right search term is golden
John Payne
22 Mar 2008
WSIC is an acronym with multiple interpretations, one of which is relevant here. For our purposes, it means "wide-span implement carrier" and refers to a category of machine wherein the components th...
The long, slow tipping point, or boiling frogs
John Payne
03 Mar 2008
It's said that if you raise the temperature slowly enough you can boil a frog alive and it will never jump out of the pot. True or not, it illustrates the idea of changes that happen so gradually we ...
Cultibotics and nutrition
John Payne
13 Jan 2008
A very long time ago, 1981 to be precise, I intended to pursue a masters degree in agronomy, with a focus on how well various agricultural systems supported balanced nutrition for those dependent upon...
Why use robots, round 5
John Payne
16 Nov 2007
Figuratively speaking, a robot is a machine with a brain. They don't really have brains, of course; they have processors and programs, which would be depicted on some low-detail flowchart as lying be...
Getting there from here, round 2
John Payne
10 Nov 2007
While it's inevitable that agriculture will eventually incorporate robotics to some degree, what form that takes is a wide open question, one that, left to itself, would eventually find an answer driv...
Why use robots, round 4
John Payne
17 Sep 2007
Machines can work continuously, 24/7. Doing so would require power enough to last through the night and either artificial lighting or night vision, and some operations are probably best left for dayli...
Size counts
John Payne
16 Sep 2007
Just as you don't really need a machine with six foot tall tires to prepare a seedbed, you don't necessarily need a machine suspended from a gantry or with legs long enough to lift it above corn tasse...
Why use robots, round 3
John Payne
15 Sep 2007
Why use robots to do what people can do, when there are so many unemployed?
Before responding to that question, let me turn it around. Why, given that there are no laws preventing them f...
Apology for sketchy references
John Payne
14 Sep 2007
I've been thinking about this – the application of robotics to horticulture on a scale large enough to replace (some significant portion of) conventional agriculture – for a very long time, and I'...
Why use robots, round 2
John Payne
13 Sep 2007
One measure by which conventional agriculture likes to judge itself, the output per man hour, or, put another way, the percentage of the population directly engaged in crop production, is seriously mi...
Why use robots?
John Payne
12 Sep 2007
It's going to take more than a single post to answer that question. There are so many reasons that it's hard to keep track of them all.
From an ecological point of view, robots can help ...
Getting there from here
John Payne
07 Jun 2007
If you look at the current state of agriculture, and also at the preponderance of robotics work related to it, there isn't much encouragement to be found for a vision of machines bringing better pract...
The robotics of place
John Payne
24 Dec 2006
The following is only slightly reworked from three posts I wrote, one after the other, in 1999. These posts together formed the starting point of a topic with the surprising title "The Robotics of Pl...
Open source robotics toolkits
John Payne
11 Sep 2006
IBM developerWorks is a great resource.
This developerWorks article discusses open source software for modeling and testing robotic designs in software.
(Found on AI Buzz. [2...
Four football fields…every single blade of grass
John Payne
10 Sep 2006
Think I'm crazy in suggesting that a machine could track every single plant over an area of several acres? This Digg item [2012Oct13: no longer available] says this experimental camera can image “e...
Robotics in transportation
John Payne
09 Sep 2006
While my primary interest in robotics is as it relates to horticulture and agriculture, I've also long been interested in the potential utility of robotics in urban transportation, especially when com...
What’s happening in robotics?
John Payne
23 Aug 2006
There are too many robotics related websites to catalog them all. Here are few of them...
IEEE Robotics and Automation Society's Technical Committee on Service Robots website contains a ...
On the meaning of “cultivation”
John Payne
22 Aug 2006
As it commonly applies to raising plants, "cultivation" usually refers to a process involving the manipulation of soil, to incorporate plant residues into the soil after the previous harvest, to prep...
Robotic master gardeners
John Payne
17 Aug 2006
This blog is about a vision of a future in which the tending of productive land has been turned over to autonomously operating machines that approach this task much like a master gardener would, one p...
