horticultural robotics

Vitirover, solar-powered mower for vineyards

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...

21 January 2013, by John Payne

Technology for its own sake vs. benefits

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...

23 December 2012, by John Payne

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

“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 ...

29 November 2012, by John Payne

Robot allowed to prune French vines | Singularity Hub

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...

27 November 2012, by John Payne

Down on the robofarm | equities.com

"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...

26 October 2012, by John Payne

Reforming agriculture through more sophisticated mechanization

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...

10 December 2011, by John Payne

Robots under glass: The threshold of minimal investment

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...

04 January 2009, by John Payne

More specifically, how would they work?

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...

22 November 2008, by John Payne

Imagine a machine built for efficient gardening

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 ...

18 November 2008, by John Payne

Cultibotics and nutrition

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...

13 January 2008, by John Payne

Apology for sketchy references

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'...

14 September 2007, by John Payne

Robotic master gardeners

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...

17 August 2006, by John Payne