Peter has an admirable ability to choose projects and deliver the goods on them. Robotics needs more like him.
Interview with Corke on this subject:
http://robohub.org/robots-zero-tillage-robotics/
Homepage with free stuff including books and MOOC:
http://petercorke.com/wordpress/
edit: I'm not affiliated with QUT and have no conflict of interest. I'm an academic that does related work but not in agriculture.
On top of that, chemical applicators are relatively simple and proven technology with few moving parts. Farm equipment isn't like your car that can go 100,000 miles without problem. Moving parts on farm equipment will break – constantly. On top of that, computer technology does not come cheap when it is low volume specialized systems, built to withstand the harsh environments of agriculture.
I have no doubt the technology is possible, but I do wonder if it is possible in a price range that would actually improve the bottom line.
This isn't experimental. It's now owned by John Deere and is currently doing 10% of the US lettuce crop. Next, cotton. There's no problem with plants becoming resistant to weed-killers. Unless pigweed learns to look like lettuce, it's going to get zapped.
It's sold as a service. For $220 an acre, Blue River comes and zaps your weeds. Now available in the Salinas Valley and Yuma, AZ.
adding high maintenance robots is just silly.
If someone can make a drone to fly around and take out pests like fruitfly that would be a massive step forward vs spraying.
Why bother with that when we already have controlled facilities where pests simply can't gain a foot hold in the first place, making that labor totally unnecessary?
As far as field trucks go, well they're mostly old 15+ years with new-ish trailers because well trucking doesn't pay shit so it'll be long time before self driving trucks replace the current fleet (you have to figure the new trucks on the road now will because part time field trucks 20 years from now). If can get GPS accurate enough you could automate a lot of it, but trucks get stuck all the time in the field which mean the guy driving the chopper has to stop and pull the truck out.
It'll be tricky to automate all the weird oddities you come across out in the field. In the end these guys aren't making very much so the cost benefit doesn't really seem to be there but we'll see.
What would be really cool is automating crops that still require lots of manual labor. Like vegetables. That's the reason they are still so expensive. An automated greenhouse would be enormous news.
Whats also cool is stuff like this (https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial-robo...) which eliminates the need for pesticides.
My observations have been that vegetables are so inexpensive they're often thrown away?
Obviously these cheap crops are often grown in a monetarily cheap but environmentally destructive way but I've no idea where you're seeing these expensive vegetables for sale?
Same deal with coffee beans, which contributes to their higher price. The coffee beans do not ripen at the same time, so they must be hand-picked so the worker can identify which ones are ready. Lots of manual labor.
And with coffee being so widely consumed, savings here would easily be felt by a lot of people, although I doubt Starbucks would like it...
What crops have the highest labor costs, in both absolute dollars and as a percentage of what the consumer pays?
How far away is automation of those kinds of tasks, I wonder? I don't have much of any idea, myself.
I already farm a field that is one acre in size and one that is three acres because they are near to a large field that does justify the travel costs. Any that fit that description are likely to be already in production.
I do wish for better food, and better life for farmers. Also I'm quite annoyed by mainstream tech (find it often uselessly improving the wrong parts of life).
Perhaps these would be a model for smaller autonomous combines.
This video, by the head of Harper Adams College, goes into a lot more detail:
Agricultural machinery size is now limited by train tunnel size for delivery.
Larger farm vehicles, although more productive per person are heavier and cause soil compaction, which then requires further treatments to fix. Mention was made of light robot tractors able to work wet fields earlier before they are dry enough for a heavy human tractor so extending they growing season. They show an example of a light weight tractor that can drive up and down on a wet field without turning it into mud.
I have always wondered who are these farmers in the dirt in the early morning? Where I farm the environment is rarely suitable for 'being in the dirt' in the morning. Typically the field work starts in the mid-afternoon after the sun has had a chance to dry up the morning's dew or previous days rain. There are definitely some late nights though.
That's what air conditioning is for!
Southern California vineyards, for one. Come work in 100+F heat at 9:30AM.
Still, there is no set pattern of farmer behaviour. It is interesting that the idea of get up early has become so pervasive.
good thing is that would be not require nearly as much 'babysitting' as growing crops just ability to charter uneven terrain.
What will it take to have a small fleet of robots to manage small farms - but many small farms.
What if a community of gardens and farms were dispersed around a neighborhood/small town - and the town shared the use of the autonomous robots wherever possible.
Which robots are common to all farms and which robots are specific to a given crop?
Also, the downplay the robot-management tasks (refueling, recharging, interceding in really bad weather to tell the robots "that'll do robot, no farming today" sort of stuff)
An open library of farm robots, the tasks they can do, their cost options, how much crop area /number of farms/acres they can manage, if they can multi-task between activities specific to tomatoes in one farm and corn in another etc...
That would be interesting data.
Then couple that with the open source civilization plans - and update those to make those items more intelligent for efficiencies in their designed tasks.
In 100 years, if we can get an atmosphere on mars, we just send a fully automated pre-colonizing farm fleet to prep our invasion.
Regardless, we could still have a fleet of robots go build structures there, then another that will grow things in the structures...
We talk about sending men to mars, but I think it's short-sighted to not first figure out how to send and deploy resources and robots to pre-build infrastructure for said humans - and we should be practicing on the moon.
Or why is it that nobody seems to be talking about this? And specifically talking about practicing in the moon?
Spacex is really focused on a rocket that can get to mars, how much more quickly can it get to the moon?
I estimate they destroyed over 50% of my (potential) crop this year, which makes you wonder how much toxic stuff goes on all those perfect field-grown cabbages etc you see in supermarkets...
Seriously they are brilliant and the eggs are just this great bonus. The more insects they eat the tastier the eggs! You do need to visit them at least once per day, however auto-feeders and automatic coop openers do mean you are only going to collect eggs and maybe refill water. They also have amazing characters.
If you have a good relationship with other allotment holders then they can also collect eggs and look after them for you if you go on holiday.
If you do consider getting some, get point of lay chickens as they will give you a lot more eggs in the long run. Rescue chickens are a friendlier than some of the pure breeds but you do not get the variety of egg colours.
You do not need a cockerel but do expect hens to crow after laying. They love shouting about it.
But I'm curious, how would the chickens get to the slugs? Don't they have to be kept in a fenced off enclosure, away from the plants - otherwise they would damage young seedlings etc?
We do have a population of toads which I think eat the slugs, but they just don't eat enough of them! And the local cats, in turn, seem to be quite interested in eating the toads...
New tech is expensive and not very good - only big businesses see positive ROI. As some technology matures, it becomes a commodity for everyone.
Small farms could go do this right now. It just wouldn't make financial sense.
As far as actual food I'm more impressed by small scale open source farm bot projects and some of the innovative stuff permaculturists are doing without tech.
Factory farmers = Microsoft/Windows
Small scale farmers = Open Source/Linux
They would get a more accurate number if they calculated how much these machines depreciated over that period instead of just throwing in their total cost.
http://tlalexander.com/sanctuary/
(I also build robots) :)
I'm just some engineer. But I'm a really imaginative and passionate person and I have a lot of ideas I care about. And so I write about those. I was inspired by reading The Martian, which was an amazing book written by a Software Engineer. It was after reading The Martian that I began writing.
Have you tried writing? What has been your blocker?
What also works best for me is writing the shit that I actually want to read, or developing the games that I actually want to play.
Write from the heart, and love it so much that you re-read your own stories.
Most people probably won't read it or like it. But that's just the game we play!
Minimal supply chains are necessary if you can produce crops autonomously at the point of consumption (think rooftop solar). It would be wildly inefficient to grow in each person's backyard, but not so to grow in the outer rings of urban areas.
Automated production is essential. Supply chains for abundant, distributed resources are superfluous.
Also, I'm not sure how automation of labor democratizes supply. supply isn't constrained by labor. It is constrained by yield. Automation won't solve that as much as chemical engineering or more land would.
