From ploughs to seed drills to tractors, evolving technology has brought about radical changes to agriculture over the years. Now the sector is poised for another shift as robotic farmhands gear up to make agriculture greener and more efficient.Three things now make mobile agricultural robots a real possibility in the near future, says Tony Stentz, an engineer at Carnegie Mellon University's robotics institute.
Firstly, mobile robots have now proved able to cope with complex outdoor environments
; secondly, the price of production has fallen; and, finally, society should now see robot labourers as a benefit not a curse.
Robots could address growing concerns in the developed world about a lack of labour availability in a sector reliant on intense bursts of tough, seasonal work. "Automation is becoming a necessity rather than an enhancement," says John Billingsley at Australia's National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture in Toowoomba, Queensland.
Perhaps ironically, the fact that robots are now becoming capable of taking on the muddy challenges of food production is in large part down to the military.
The technology needed to make the leap from autonomous robots transporting things around factories to getting their wheels dirty in the field has been honed by events like the US DARPA grand challenge, a series of races for autonomous cars that had teams sending them across the desert or even through urban streets with real traffic.
Stentz helped an SUV called "Boss" win the Urban Challenge in 2007 and also worked on Crusher, a 6-tonne vehicle capable of driving unaided across extreme terrain.
"If you can deal with an off-road environment you have never seen before then you're well equipped for agriculture," says Stentz. "We have hit the elbow in the curve for this technology making it big outdoors." He thinks that the next few years will see rapid changes in what robots can practically and affordably offer farmers.
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