Artificial Intelligence In Agriculture Part 1

Agriculture has played and will continue to play a major role in the society. It has been feeding nations and also increasing Gross Domestic product of so many countries in the world today. In agricultural production, there are several different methodologies and processes which require a rather high energy input. At the same time, the markets require output products of high quality.

According to wikipedia, Agriculture is the cultivation and breeding of animals, plants and fungi for food, fiber, biofuel, medicinal plants and other products used to sustain and enhance human life. Agriculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the development of civilization.

The global population of the world is expected to be over 8 billion, which means more agricultural production will be needed to meet food demands. Commercial farming require new and innovative technologies to solve this problem. Artificial intelligence robotics is one of these technologies that promises to provide a solution by creating robots that will help agriculture in the future. Some of these robots are: 

• weeding robot
• Driverless tractor
• Lettuce robot
• Strawberry harvesting robot
• The swarming farmbot
• Crop-spraying drone 

weeding robot

Danish agricultural engineers have built a robot to help farmers with weeds – Hortibot. The Hortibot is about 3-foot-by-3-foot, is self-propelled, and uses global positioning system (GPS). It can recognize 25 different kinds of weeds and eliminate them by using its weed-removing attachments. It’s eco-friendly, because it sprays exactly above the weeds (it can reduce herbicide usage by 75 percent). As machine is light – between 200 and 300 kilograms – it won’t hurt soil behind it. It’s also cheaper than tools currently used for weed-elimination as it can work during extended periods of time.

Driverless tractor

Driverless tractors are getting closer to farmlands. Companies in an arey of industries are developing variations of driverless tractors that would turn a century-old machines over to robots and free farmers to do other work without having to hire someone to take their place. Using ever-more sophisticated software coupled with off-the-shelf technology including sensors, radar, and GPS, the system allows an operator working a combine to set the course of a driverless tractor pulling a grain cart, position the cart to receive the grain from the combine, and then send the fully loaded cart to be unloaded. Autonomous harvesters and planters may possibly overcome the problem of an inadequate supply of skilled labor during planting and harvesting, allow more acreage to be worked for longer time periods, demonstrate higher efficiency for precision agriculture and could prove more economical, especially if they work continuously.

lettuce robot

A lettuce robot is used for the thinning and weeding of lettuce to increase yield. Its vision system scrutinizes each plant and then applies advanced artificial intelligence algorithms that make plant-by-plant decisions to optimize yield and then eliminate unwanted plants according to its programming. Precision lettuce-thinning can characterize every plot by counting plants and plant spacing, building canopy height distributions, and measuring key physiological parameters, generate tabulate data and statistics for each plot and build plot image library that contains all images and plot reconstructions from every plot.

Strawberry harvesting robot

Labor shortage spurs farmers to use robots for handling delicate tasks in the fresh-produce industry, writes The Wall Street Journal. Automated harvester wheeled through rows of strawberry plants, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry’s most pressing problems: a shortfall of farmhands. Increased mechanization of the fresh-produce industry boosts productivity, ultimately helping to tamp down price growth. It also help farmers, who are struggling with a yearlong drought in the country’s largest produce state, get more from their fields, offsetting higher costs. In addition, this system allows to avoid the labor shortages, existing in many developed and developing countries.

Reference

Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture. Part 1: How Farming is Going Automated with Robots. Retrieved from http://ai.business