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2012 Field Robot Event, June 28th – 30th
This will be the 10th edition of the Field Robot Event. Organized by Fontys University of Applied Sciences and Wageningen UR (University & Research), it will be held in Venlo, The Netherlands,...
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Nikolaus Correll at TEDx Front Range 2012
University of Colorado Assistant Professor Nikolaus Correll, speaking at TEDx Front Range earlier this year, outlined his vision for transforming agriculture through robotic cultivation. (Correll...
View Article10th annual Field Robot Event underway
This year’s Field Robot Event (FRE 2012) began today and runs through Saturday. I will bring together what reports I am able to find once the dust settles, but meanwhile you can view videos from past...
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Field Robot Event 2012 in video
The first video in this playlist is a presentation given last year at the announcement of the event. The rest were taken at the event itself, and show the nature of the competition as well as...
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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 ArticleRobotic master gardeners
This blog is about a vision of a future in which the tending of productive land has been turned over to autonomously operating machines that approach this task much like a master gardener would, one...
View ArticleOn the meaning of “cultivation”
As it commonly applies to raising plants, “cultivation” usually refers to a process involving the manipulation of soil, to incorporate plant residues into the soil after the previous harvest, to...
View ArticleWhat’s happening in robotics?
There are too many robotics related websites to catalog them all. Here are few of them IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Technical Committee on Service Robots website contains a page dedicated...
View ArticleRobotics in transportation
While my primary interest in robotics is as it relates to horticulture and agriculture, I’ve also long been interested in the potential utility of robotics in urban transportation, especially when...
View ArticleFour football fields…every single blade of grass
Think I’m crazy in suggesting that a machine could track every single plant over an area of several acres? This Digg item [2012Oct13: no longer available] says this experimental camera can image “every...
View ArticleOpen source robotics toolkits
IBM developerWorks is a great resource. This developerWorks article discusses open source software for modeling and testing robotic designs in software. (Found on AI Buzz. [2012Oct13: now a...
View ArticleThe robotics of place
The following is only slightly reworked from three posts I wrote, one after the other, in 1999. These posts together formed the starting point of a topic with the surprising title “The Robotics of...
View ArticleGetting there from here
If you look at the current state of agriculture, and also at the preponderance of robotics work related to it, there isn’t much encouragement to be found for a vision of machines bringing better...
View ArticleWhy use robots?
It’s going to take more than a single post to answer that question. There are so many reasons that it’s hard to keep track of them all. From an ecological point of view, robots can help replace a...
View ArticleWhy use robots, round 2
One measure by which conventional agriculture likes to judge itself, the output per man hour, or, put another way, the percentage of the population directly engaged in crop production, is seriously...
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