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TE+ND Rover in Boca Bearings competition
In case you’ve forgotten, this video provides a clear explanation of the concept behind and the mechanical workings of the TE+ND Rover. For more, check out their page on the competition website....
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Video: new remote sensors from Agri Con at DLG Field Days
See on Scoop.it – Cultibotics Hermann Leithold, product manager for Agri Con, explains the company’s precision technologies at its display at DLG Field Days in Bernburg-Strenzfeld, Germany, held June...
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Aeroponics (using mist in place of full submersion)
LED lights are far more efficient than incandescents, but enough light to drive photosynthesis will still require significant power, so one still might ask where the power is going to come from.
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Quote from Clay Johnson, author of “The Information Diet”
We industrialized our agricultural firms, consolidating them into multinational, billion dollar publicly traded corporations. As a result, they no longer have nutritional responsibility, they have...
View ArticleTechnology for its own sake vs. benefits
On using robots to make gardening scalable to millions of acres… You might wonder why I want to turn land management over to robots. Is it because I’m such a geek that I think everything goes better...
View ArticleThe potential of agriculture as a market for robotics
When I imagine robots tending land, it’s nearly always machines that are supported from above, on a beam that itself is supported by wheels running either on rails or in troughs that double as a...
View ArticleDARPA-led consortium casts a wide net
A consortium of U.S. government agencies, lead by DARPA, has jointly issued a solicitation for small business proposals: Joint-Agency SBIR Funding Opportunity Announcement. The participating agencies...
View ArticleThe ascendency of Arduino
This video consists of the earliest participants in the Arduino project talking about how it got started. Checking Vimeo, there are over 4,000 videos there tagged “arduino”. [2012Oct14: now over...
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Harvest automation
And so it begins! The January 14th episode of Robots Podcast features an interview with Joe Jones, CTO of Harvest Automation (previously with iRobot). Harvest Automation didn’t start out with the...
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Some things can’t be done without robots
I had pretentions of being a back-to-the-land hippy before I ever became seriously interested in robotics, but my brother successfully popped that bubble with a simple, unarguable observation, that...
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Agricultural robotics and employment
At least with regard to agriculture, the effect of robotics upon employment depends on the approach taken. If your goal is to further reduce the number of people deriving an income from farming, and...
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The importance of robotics to the achievement of sustainability
In a mid-August post bearing the same title, on my primary blog, I stated: I firmly believe that (short of convincing the vast majority of people to return to subsistence farming, something which could...
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Emma Marris: Rambunctious Garden
While I fully expect Emma Marris would deem the use of robots to create her Rambunctious Garden a distraction, and my contention that robotics is necessary to the achievement of sustainability...
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Abandoned railway roadbeds
In the Emma Marris video, linked from a previous post, there appears to be an abandoned railway roadbed in the background. Such spaces almost automatically return to nature, left to themselves for a...
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Reforming agriculture through more sophisticated mechanization
Historically, at least since the mechanization of agriculture began in earnest, there have been two primary measures of agricultural productivity, the amount that could be grown on a given acreage and...
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IPM: Integrated pest management
The concept of Integrated Pest Management has been around for several decades, and is just as useful in a robotic, no-till scenario as it is combined with conventional, traction-based agriculture,...
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Australian research organization’s description of agricultural robotics
On a web page describing their current efforts in agricultural robotics, CSIRO ICT Centre describes the focus area this way: The application of field robotics to agriculture is an emerging area of...
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Platform for agricultural robotics development
Something that would help move the work on robotic sensors and manipulators for agriculture forward would be an affordable, robust platform on which they could be mounted and transported through a...
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Agricultural robotics at the European Robotics Forum 2012
A press release issued by the European Robotics Platform website regarding agricultural robotics as a presence at the European Robotics Forum 2012 makes plain not only that there is a significant level...
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