Farm Robots Will Change Agriculture

Farm Robots and Agriculture

How will farm robots affect agriculture in the coming years?  Will farm robots be the answer to the looming shortage of farm labor?  Although form robots or some years away from widespread use researchers are making breakthroughs that will revolutionize farming methods.

Farm robots may be able to eliminate most uses for chemicals on the farm or in agriculture in general.  For the typical farm, this would mean a large savings in terms of both herbicide and pesticide application.

What is an Agribot?

This definition on Wikipedia

Agricultural Robots or agribot is a robot deployed for agricultural purposes. The main area of application of robots in agriculture is at the harvesting stage. Fruit picking robots, driverless tractor / sprayer, and sheep shearing robots are designed to replace human labor.Robots can be used for other horticultural tasks such as pruning, weeding, spraying and monitoring.

It may replace herbicides and farmworkers.

Weeding with machine learning, not herbicides

Robots – are they just a thing of the future? Many in the agriculture sector agree that the industry is heading in the direction of having more technology on the farm, which could even include robots. In fact, there are already several companies that have made significant strides in creating robotic systems for use in agriculture that are either in field-testing stages or already entering the market. At the recent Yuma Ag Summit held in February 2018 in Yuma, AZ, several systems were on display or discussed at the event. There is a lot of interest in this type of technology in regions such as Arizona and California, where a lot of produce and specialty crops are grown. These crops often require intensive hand-labor, but labor shortages in the industry have created a problem for farmers. This problem could potentially be solved by robots that could make up for those shortages.

Source: Top 5 Robotic Systems to Watch in Agriculture | PrecisionAg

Source: Popular Science

Source: This robot that destroys 120 weeds per minute could revolutionize food production

Weeding with machine learning, not herbicides

Source: Popular Science