Robots may transform farms making them more efficient
EAST MEON, England — Faced with seesawing commodity prices and the pressure to be more efficient and environmentally friendly, farmer Jamie Butler is trying out a new worker on his 450-acre farm in England's Hampshire countryside.
Methodically inspecting Butler's winter wheat crop for weeds and pests, the laborer doesn't complain or even break a sweat. That's because it's a four-wheel robot dubbed “Tom” that uses GPS, artificial intelligence and smart phone technology to digitally map the field.
Tom's creator, the Small Robot Company, is part of a wave of “agri-tech” startups working to transform production in a sector that is under economic strain due to market pressures to keep food cheap, a rising global population and the uncertainties of climate change. Most robots are still only being tested, but they offer a glimpse of how automation will spread from manufacturing plants into rural areas.
“If we can keep our costs to an absolute minimum by being on the leading edge of technologies as one method of doing that, then that's a really, really good thing,” said Butler, one of 20 British farmers enlisted in a yearlong trial.
Next year, the British startup plans to start testing two more robots controlled by an artificial intelligence system that will work alongside Tom, autonomously doing precision “seeding, feeding and weeding.”
The aim is to drastically cut down on fertilizer and pesticide use to lower costs and boost profits for struggling farmers. As such, it not only helps economically, but it also lowers the environmental impact of farming.
“What we're doing is stuff that people can't do,” said Ben Scott-Robinson, co-founder of the Small Robot Company.
Commercial sales of the full, multi-robot system is still years away, with larger-scale testing planned for 2021. They represent the next step in the evolution of automation for farms. Self-driving tractors and robotic milking machines have been in use for years and, more recently, unmanned aerial drones that monitor crops have gone into service.
Florida's Harvest Croo Robotics, Spain's Agrobot, Britain's Dogtooth Technologies and Belgium's Octinion are all developing berry-picking bots. California startup Iron Ox and Japan's Spread grow vegetables in automated indoor farms. Bosch startup Deepfield Robotics is working on a weeding robot that punches them into the ground.
Last year, British researchers planted, tended and harvested a barley crop using only autonomous machines.
