RoboFarming.com Hypertechnological innovation has always underpin American agriculture. In the later half of the 1800s, for instance, flotillas of proto-steampunk dredge boats plowed through the Illinois landscape, carving canals, straightening rivers and re-knitting its embryonic, post-glacial hydrology, their lived-in land-sailors draining and transforming the weedy, swampy, supposedly pestilential swat of the American prairie into the most productive landscape in the world.
More recently, a new form of agricultural practice has been developed. Called precision farming, this entails using aerial and satellite imagery, global positioning systems (GPS), sensors and information management tools (GIS) to help farmers better manage their croplands. Where might blogging, RSS feeds and MySpace fit in, it isn’t quite clear.
Now we learn, from an article published by Wired and another by the Associated Press, that troops of robotic harvesters are being readied to invade the orchards and vegetable fields of California and, presumably, other important growing regions in Florida and Hawaii.
From the AP article:
Mechanized picking wouldn’t be new for some California crops such as canning tomatoes, low-grade wine grapes and nuts.
But the fresh produce that dominates the state’s agricultural output – and that consumers expect to find unblemished in supermarkets – is too fragile to be picked by the machines now in use.
The new pickers rely on advances in computing power and hydraulics that can make robotic limbs and digits operate with near-human sensitivity. Modern imaging technology also enables the machines to recognize and sort fruits and vegetables of varying qualities.
Wired goes into more details. At an orange orchard, for example, two robots would work as a team: one an eagle-eyed scout, the other a metallic octopus with a gentle touch. The first robot will scan the tree and build a 3-D map, after which it has to evaluate each piece of fruit. What size is the orange? What color is it? Does it have black spots on it?
With the needed data collected, the scout robot will then determine the best order in which to pick them. It sends that information to the second robot, a harvester that will pick the tree clean, following a planned sequence that keeps its eight long arms from bumping into each other.
If we forgo the important issues of migrant labor, illegal immigration, social justice and even globalization, which the creation and deployment of these machines touch upon, we are left to wonder what would happen, assuming they are networked to the interweb, if they were hacked?