 |
Joe Allnutt, lead
roboticist at British startup company the Small Robot Company, inspects a
farming robot named Tom as part of a trial in East Meon, southern England,
Friday Nov. 30, 2018. The "agri-tech" startup company is developing
lightweight autonomous machines that can carry out precision "seeding,
feeding and weeding" in the hope of transforming food production. (AP
Photo / Kelvin Chan)
|
Faced with seesawing commodity prices and the
pressure to be more efficient and environmentally friendly, farmer Jamie Butler
is trying out a new worker on his 450-acre farm in England’s Hampshire
countryside.
Methodically inspecting Butler’s winter wheat
crop for weeds and pests, the laborer 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 “agri-tech” 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 only being tested, but they offer a glimpse of how automation will
spread from manufacturing plants into 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,” said Butler, one of 20 British farmers
enlisted in a yearlong 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 fertilizer
and pesticide use to lower costs and boost profits for struggling farmers. 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,”
said Ben Scott-Robinson, 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 as a robot and as focused and accurate as an AI to be
able to achieve that.”
 |
A farming robot named
"Tom" produced by Small Robot Company as part of a field trial to
develop new farm technologies, in East Meon, southern England, Friday Nov. 30,
2018. The "agri-tech" startup company is developing lightweight
autonomous machines that can carry out precision "seeding, feeding and
weeding" in the hope of transforming food production. (AP Photo / Kelvin
Chan)
|
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,” said 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, said 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
berry-picking 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 said. The low cost of air freight could still make it cheaper to, for
example, fly in fruit from other countries where labour is cheaper, he said.
To ease financial pressure on farmers reluctant
to make big one-off investments in equipment, the Small Robot Company plans to
sell its services as a monthly subscription, charging £600 pounds (US$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 said.
On Butler’s farm, Tom trundles along crop rows
taking hundreds of thousands of high-resolution pictures during the growing
season. The images are fed to Wilma, the artificial intelligence platform,
which is being trained to tell the difference between wheat and weeds.
 |
Joe Allnutt, left, lead
roboticist at British startup company the Small Robot Company, with robotics
engineer Thomas Burrell operating a farming robot named "Tom" as part
of a trial in East Meon, southern England, Friday Nov. 30, 2018. The
"agri-tech" startup company is developing lightweight autonomous
machines that can carry out precision "seeding, feeding and weeding"
in the hope of transforming food production. (AP Photo / Kelvin Chan)
|
In 2019, the company will start trials for two more robots, Dick and Harry. Dick will deliver fertilizer directly to soil around roots, instead of wasteful blanket spraying, and use a laser or micro-spray chemicals to kill weeds. Harry will insert seeds into the earth at a uniform depth and spacing, eliminating the need for tractors to plow furrows.
Originally published on DAILY MAIL UK
