horticultural robotics

Vitirover, solar-powered mower for vineyards

John Payne 21 Jan 2013

Powered by sunlight alone, and working at 500 meters per hour, VITIROVER can cover about a hectare per hundred hours of operation. If your vineyard is larger than that you'll want more than one. VIT...

Technology for its own sake vs. benefits

John Payne 23 Dec 2012

On using robots to make gardening scalable to millions of acres… 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 bet...

Future of farming geared for efficient robotic workers | Design News, by Cabe Atwell

John Payne 29 Nov 2012

“One way to achieve increased efficiency is to employ robotic farmers and automated tools, which never get tired. Not to mention bots achieve a level of precision that can’t be matched by ...

Robot allowed to prune French vines | Singularity Hub

John Payne 27 Nov 2012

Now that Wall-Ye V.I.N. has been built we can rest assured that there are no jobs too sacred to be handed over to the automated expertise of robots.See on singularityhub.com...

Down on the robofarm | equities.com

John Payne 26 Oct 2012

"Soon, we might see fields with agribots that can identify individual seedlings and coax them along with tailored drops of fertiliser and measured sips of water. Other machines would distinguish weeds...

Reforming agriculture through more sophisticated mechanization

John Payne 10 Dec 2011

Historically, at least since the mechanization of agriculture began in earnest, there have been two primary measures of agricultural productivity, the amount that could be grown on a given acreage and...

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...

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 ...

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...

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'...

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...