Israel in particular has spent a fortune on research into robotizing fruit production, since they have money but have complex relations with neighbours that make cheap labour immigration unreliable. They are working very hard on all the literal hanging fruit.
The problem is that a farm is a dirty, corrosive, and stochastic place.
Equipment needs to be tough as nails and able to deal with each unique farmers challenges.
Things I see on the horizon :
Robotic weeding is going to be a HUGE deal. Improved robotic harvesting also. These both are almost entirely reliant on robust computer vision that can survive days in the field.
Drones are going to also be a huge deal. Imagine a quad copter that can go out and sample your 1000 hectares of fields, spotting disease or nutrient deficiency from images taken from above.
The promise is big, but integrating tech seamlessly is going to be damn hard.
I believe that one is already a reality. Some quick Googling turns up: http://www.precisiondrone.com/drones-for-agriculture.html I'm pretty sure I saw a TV special too.
I'm sure that there are areas to be improved upon, but I expect a lot of the low hanging fruit has been picked, as it were.
I also tend to think of farmers as the original hackers, they often have problems, and they cobble together a solution that might not be pretty, but works.
Once I finished some other projects I'll looking into Arduino or something similar to start hacking at some ideas I have.
By the way, you are indeed right that farmers have already done most of the hacking themselves.
One of the things that I'm looking at (as a hobby research topic) are automating managed intensive rotational grazing for cattle and remote herd management.
I have/had a few ideas I was researching and at least one I plan on testing on my own acreage this summer. Figuring out how to market to a population that doesn't seem to have a big online presence is the hurdle I haven't crossed yet.
Surely, these projects sow the seeds of eventual progress.
So this is something in the robotics field that has been long-coming. If you'd like to get an idea of what the future holds for people, take a look at cows, a creature that has a lot of financial value. The idea is that the cow is tagged to be uniquely identified, when the cow approaches a service center, for say salt or food, the system reads the ID and delivers an appropriate form of nourishment. When the cow is uncomfortable due to lack of milking, the system milks the cow. Next up, I'm sure, will be automated detection of sick cows along with some basic veterinary interdiction. Finally it would be very easy to add a little bit of behavioral control to the system, either a mild shock, a noise, or some other stimulus to gently train the animal over time. I could even imagine a farm without fences, managed completely by robots and conditioned cows. The cows are happy, the people are happy.
Pretty cool. Also a bit unnerving.
I don't think there needs to be a robot revolt. I think over a few centuries they'll just slowly manage us into extinction, where we will most likely belong.
Obligatory link to Manna (sci-fi story about robots and bots impact on humans) - http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Once driverless cars are perfected, driverless tractors will be right there with them too, they will be hugely popular.
If you think about it, driverless tractors are a much easier problem than driving a car.
Long-term, that is a dead end. The thing is, you don't have to bring in your cows, and certainly not all at the same time, if you have a milking robot. They will come in by themselves if they want to be milked.
Also, I find it curious that this is news. Milking robots have been used for decades (since the early 1990's)
Economically, we have about reached the point where the robot is economically feasible (a robot increases milk production, but costs money, both in investments and in electricity. It's not a given that the increase in milk production pays for the extra costs)
Where I live they grow a lot of pea's and the period between "ready to harvest" and "pig food" is pretty short, it's a spectacular sight at night watching them go up and down the hills near here in the dark (always reminds me of War of the Worlds as they have rotating spotlights) harvesting.
Its amazing how difficult these problems are. This type of work relies on things that humans are optimized to do - forage and produce food. We are arguably the best robot for some of these tasks.
Automatic berry picking for "tree type" bushes is a reality as well.
The downside is that you need a lot of antibiotics for the cows. In the end, people will eat the meat and drink the milk of such animals plus a dose of antibiotics. More and more get an immunity.
So worse is better. (aka low tech agriculture with less animals in one farm building)
I was writing about big farming companies with many cows. To keep a lot of animals healthy in a narrow space you have to inject each cow antibiotics in advance.
Antibiotic in livestock is a real problem already - at least in the Europe. The media and the doctors speak open about the issues, yet some big farming companies don't care.
Everyone is fine if farmer inject antibiotics to ill cows. But giving all cows antibiotics all the time (in advance), just in case, is the problem. People will drink & eat it and if they get ill or are in hospital, the same antibiotics has no good effect anymore. And people already die because the aftermath (hospital bug).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic_use_in_livestock#Con...
