Hard grind no sweat for robots
These tireless workers may be the answer to providing cheap food and addressing climate change
Faced with seesawing commodity prices and the pressure to be more efficient and sustainable, farmer Jamie Butler is trying out a new worker on his 182-hectare farm in Hampshire, England.
inspecting Butler’s winter wheat crop for weeds and pests, the labourer 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 smartphone technology to digitally map the field.
Tom’s creator, the Small Robot Company, is part of a wave of agritech 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 being tested, but they offer a glimpse of how automation will change 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,” says Butler, one of 20 British farmers enlisted in a year-long 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 fertiliser and pesticide use to lower costs and boost profits. 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,” says Ben ScottRobinson, co-founder of the Small Robot Company. “It’s not physically possible for a farmer to go round and check each individual plant and then treat that plant individually. That’s only possible when you have something as tireless — and as focused and accurate — as a robot.”
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.
Eventually, farms “will be able to automate virtually everything”, says Tim Chambers, a fruit farmer who’s not involved in the trial.
Some jobs are harder to automate, such as harvesting delicate raspberries or strawberries by hand, but even that is coming, says Chambers, a member of Britain’s National Farmers Union.
Florida’s Harvest Croo Robotics, Spain’s Agrobot, Britain’s Dogtooth Technologies and Belgium’s Octinion are all developing berrypicking 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, monitored, tended and harvested a barley crop using only autonomous machines, in what they said was a world first.
A more fundamental problem “will be the cost of building those robots and the research that has to go into making them”, Chambers says. The low cost of air freight could still make it cheaper to, for example, fly in fruit from other countries where labour is cheaper.
To ease financial pressure on farmers reluctant to make big oneoff investments in equipment, the Small Robot Company plans to sell its services as a monthly subscription, charging $765 per hectare a year.
With a bright orange 3D-printed body, and beefy all-terrain wheels, Tom resembles an oversized roller skate. Their light weight means these robots won’t compact soil the way tractors do, Scott-Robinson says. ■ —AP