Agriculture has a genuine use case; fruit picking and weeding is back-breaking, hard, labor and the season is short. Robotics should be able to help, either in the form of mechanization with tractors and loaders or via robotic assistance…potentially using IoT connectivity, automation and remote control.
I had a word with a digital friend about this topic, to get some insider information from a genuine expert. The feedback was that virtuality is easy while reality is harder to build for. We know, IoT is connectivity built for real world applications. The real world environment is always changing, materials and parts are not standardized. There are few robot production lines constructing and repairing their counterparts for real world compatibility, yet.
Let’s backtrack slightly. What we are discussing here are the type of robotics that appear in TV and movies. The Star Wars model, made of metal with some sort of electronic processor. Ripley from “Aliens” exo-skeleton concept is slow to gestate, even though it seems perfectly feasible with modern materials, hydraulics, miniaturized motors and energy capture concepts.
Some of the big boys have been building humanoid or dog robots since the year zero. Agriculture has many different crops, farm layouts, and techniques, making “one-size-fits-all” robots rare. Autonomous tractors, equipped with GPS and AI-driven systems, can be fine in flat, square fields of the American Midwest, but require significant investment. The 100, 000 USD asking price for a tractor might be less of a head-scratcher than configuring the options.
A robotic harvester has to deal with rain, mud, bugs clogging sensors, and fruit growing in random places. Robots are limited by battery efficiency. A robot working in a warehouse (flat floors, fixed shelves) is much easier to develop than one picking strawberries in a field where lighting, plant growth, terrain and weather are subject to constant change.
We discussed this topic previously when we referenced industrial robotics and their universal use in manufacturing processes. The key difference between agriculture and industry is that bulk human labor is a major asset; the work is repetitive, but it is not uniform. Until now it is still not scalable to invest in robotics (for most farms) when the price point of physical human labor is cheaper.
