why use robots, round 5

Figuratively speaking, a robot is a machine with a brain. They don't really have brains, of course; they have processors and programs, which would be depicted on some low-detail flowchart as lying between sensors and actuators. But, for many purposes, processors and programs are as good as a brain, in some cases even better. If you can accurately describe, at the level of detail a computer requires, what a brain would be doing in some particular circumstance, what factors it would be taking into account and what decisions it would be making, there's a good chance you could craft a program that would serve just as well. Load this program into the processor of an appropriately designed machine, and you have a machine capable of handling the job.

Granted that it's far easier to create such a program for a machine intended to vend beverage cans than for one intended to plant, tend, and harvest a mixture of crops in an uncontrolled, nonuniform environment. The latter is harder, but not impossible, nor even so far beyond some other tasks to which computers have already been put, such as handling a complex mix of financial transactions or handling the control surfaces of an otherwise unstable aircraft.

Plants have numerous characteristics which, if not already known, are at least measurable. Soils likewise can be measured and typed. Weather is the most unpredictable factor, but even weather is regular enough to be categorized as a climate, and statistical approaches allow decisions to be made in the face of unknowables, which on average work out well enough. It's a complex context, but not unmanageably so.

Thankfully, it isn't necessary that any such system perform perfectly. It's only necessary, as an initial condition, that it either perform on par with conventional practice while costing less, or outperform conventional practice while costing about the same.

This becomes easier with each passing year, as the cost of diesel fuel and other petroleum-based agricultural inputs steadily rises, and as the power of computing equipment and the sophistication of programming tools improve.

The rising cost of petroleum works against conventional practice and for a dramatically different approach utilizing robotics because conventional practice is utterly dependent upon huge amounts of fuel, fertilizer, and pesticides, whereas robotics can make possible an alternative approach without those dependencies.

The alternative approach itself is as old as gardening. Robotics can make this approach a contender by duplicating the knowledge, skills, and hands of the gardener many times over, making it applicable to land areas measured in hundreds or thousands of acres instead of square feet. That's where the distinction between a robot and other types of machines comes in. A robot is a machine with a brain of its own. Robots can operate autonomously, meaning there doesn't have to be a human operator present and you don't need as many human operators as you have machines.

That's an essential point. It's the one-to-one correspondence between operator and machine that has shaped conventional practice, exerting upward pressure on the size and power of the machines as economics exerted upward pressure on the amount of land required to earn a decent income. And large, powerful machines are only really useful for conducting operations that are applied uniformly over entire fields. The result is mile after mile of fields, all planted to the same crop at very nearly the same time.

Breaking that one-to-one correspondence is the key to breaking the dependence on oil, while at the same time dramatically increasing the variety of production and relieving the oppressive monotony that has so overtaken the rural American landscape.

And the key to breaking that correspondence is machines with enough brains to operate autonomously.

getting there from here, round 2

While it's inevitable that agriculture will eventually incorporate robotics to some degree, what form that takes is a wide open question, one that, left to itself, would eventually find an answer driven almost entirely by the near term financial interests of the most powerful players, a.k.a. agribusiness.

Without a transformational vision, more than parsimonious transformation is unlikely to result.

I aim to provide such a vision, and to help connect and empower those who find themselves enlivened by it.

This vision is about fusing ecological reasoning into every aspect of the technology employed to conduct land management, specifically including the management of land engaged in agricultural production.

That creating such a technology is possible is beyond reasonable doubt, but whether the resources to do so will be brought to bear in a timely manner, and whether that technology will find a clear path to widespread adoption, are far less certain.

It may require that we demand it into existence.

why use robots, round 4

Machines can work continuously, 24/7. Doing so would require power enough to last through the night and either artificial lighting or night vision, and some operations are probably best left for daylight, but they needn't stop working when the sun goes down. This means that a single machine can manage a greater area than if it were only operating during the day. It's also useful in limiting damage by deer, which usually come around at night.

Machines can make use of senses we don't possess or which are more sensitive than those we do. Their vision can extend into the infrared and ultraviolet, as well as more finely dividing the visible spectrum, and can also be more detailed and quicker (tracking faster motion) or more accurately track changes over a period of days or weeks. Their hearing can be far sharper than our own. They can be equipped with chemical sensitivity capable of distinguishing between substances we would group together under broad categories, like sweet or acrid. They can also be equipped with radar and sonar, laser ranging and scanning, accurate measures of temperature, humidity, and insolation, and their manipulators can be made to gauge and control pressure more accurately than do our own fingertips. In short, machines can have far better data available to them than would an unassisted human gardener in the same position.

Machines can also correlate information very quickly, drawing on recorded data and expert systems to make decisions, and applying heuristics to experience to refine those expert systems. A machine might reasonably be expected to identify to species every plant within the area it was tending, to know whether they were considered crops, benign, weeds, or threatened or endangered, and treat them accordingly. It might be expected to predict to an accuracy of a few days when it could harvest a particular crop, and estimate to within a few percentage points the quantity that could be expected, barring a calamity such as hail or a tornado. It might also be expected to adapt a cropping plan to market conditions, for example putting in more of some crop that hadn't done well elsewhere and would therefore be in demand.

Machines can whisper to each other, via radio links, over distances far greater than a human shout will carry. They can coordinate their activities precisely, cooperating toward a common goal without so much as a hiccup.

Machines can, as has recently been demonstrated by DARPA's autonomous vehicle competitions, operate in an uncontrolled environment.

The foregoing is intended as a glimpse of how it might work once development was far along. It presumes a mature technology, some of the pieces of which aren't yet available or only just beginning to be so.

size counts

Just as you don't really need a machine with six foot tall tires to prepare a seedbed, you don't necessarily need a machine suspended from a gantry or with legs long enough to lift it above corn tassels to deal with small stuff at ground level. Sometimes it would be nice to have something smaller, a lot smaller, slithering along among the stalks, beneath the leaves.

Maybe it moves on little wheels, maybe like a snake, maybe like a centipede. Maybe it has low-set, horizontal snips in place of a mouth, as for shearing off crabgrass every time it grows back. Maybe it uses its tail like an ovipositor, to plant seeds. Maybe it produces a loud hiss to scare off hungry rabbits and deer.

Probably it would keep tabs on soil moisture and possess an array of chemical sensitivities for detecting various soil conditions, like whether anaerobic decomposition is happening near the surface.

Such a device might also apply dusts or mists to the underside of leaves, for example to control fungal growth with a light application of copper salts, or caterpillars with spores of a particular strain of bacteria.

Whatever the details, there's a place for smaller devices, representing considerably smaller investments, in a mix of machines that collaborate to manage productive land.

why use robots, round 3

Why use robots to do what people can do, when there are so many unemployed?

Before responding to that question, let me turn it around. Why, given that there are no laws preventing them from doing so, are so few people in the 'modern world' engaged in by-hand cultivation, or even cultivation using draft animals?

One big reason is that land isn't free, and the cheapest land is located far from city markets, as well as from the amenities cities provide. And, even if there were still land for homesteading, there's the matter of potable water, housing, tools, seed, food enough to last until the first crops come in, canning supplies and equipment if part of that crop has to last through the winter, and some means of transporting a portion of the crop to market. If you're growing one of the local commodity crops, you can almost leave off the transportation part, since there will already be a network in place for that purpose, and you'll only need to move your crop as far as the nearest node in that network, but you'll also be competing with other producers benefitting from economies of scale for the thin margins they're accustomed to. If, on the other hand, you're growing watermelons in wheat country, you'll have to provide your own transportation.

Okay, back to the original question, why robots, given that there are people in need of work?

People are slow. One person can just about manage five acres by hand, if they work at it full time. Depending on the climate and what's being grown, that might be enough to feed as many as twenty, or at least provide them with vegetables, which isn't such a bad consumer/producer ratio, but it's far lower than the average for conventional agriculture. One person using the sort of equipment you see everywhere in rural America, can work between 600 and 1,000 acres, planted to crops like wheat or soybeans that lend themselves to bulk handling.

People are expensive. Who's going to pay the unemployed to produce by hand a small fraction of what is already being produced far more cheaply by means of machines under direct human control? Even if the current cost of production were to rise several fold, current practice would still result in cheaper food than what workers earning minimum wage could produce by hand. Granted that the economics are better for crops that don't lend themselves to linear mechanization (performing field operations while/by moving over the surface), and that a diet limited to those that do would be significantly impoverished.

People are lazy have other priorities. And well they should! (Personally, I'm a fan of Bucky Fuller's idea of paying people, modestly, to go to school. They benefit by becoming more marketable, and society benefits through an increase in the skill-level of its workforce.)

People would be needed. A conversion from tractors to small, autonomous machines almost certainly would not result in a net displacement of workers, rather the reverse, and you're more likely to find enough people (4..8, at a guess) willing to maintain (and augment*) the machines that manage a square mile of land than you are to find enough people (about 100) willing to work that land by hand.

(* Especially at first, it's unlikely that robots would be able to do everything that needed to be done, and the gaps in their capabilities would have to be supplied otherwise, most likely by people.)

apology: sketchy references

I've been thinking about this, the application of robotics to horticulture on a scale large enough to replace (some significant portion of) conventional agriculture, for a very long time, and I'm prone to glossing over points that may not seem at all obvious to others.

For example, if these robots that I've been talking about aren't engaged in tillage, what are they doing? That remains an open question, since there are undoubtedly useful techniques I haven't yet thought of, but, for an idea of what might be possible, consider what gardeners can accomplish with their own bare hands and short-handled tools. That's the scale of manipulation I have in mind, working with individual plants and the spaces into which they're to be inserted.

Would such robots have human-like hands? Only in the vaguest sense; they're likely to have manipulators with opposable, finger-like appendages. Would they stir the soil like a gardener does with a trowel? Maybe. Would they use something like snips to do pruning? Probably, although there might be a better approach to pruning than mechanical snips, like a high velocity water jet (such as are used to cut steel in some industrial settings).

It isn't necessary, nor even desirable, to exactly replicate the set of techniques used by a gardener. Such machines would need a repertoire of techniques sufficient to manage a garden, but while some of their techniques might seem quite familiar, others might be quite beyond the capability of a human gardener.

For example, if a machine were able to identify a weed seedling early enough, it need only destroy the seedling's meristem to interrupt the growth of a weed. This requires very little energy, and might be accomplished by a precisely targeted, high velocity water droplet. Using this method, a machine might deal with several weed seedlings per second, limited only by the speed with which it could identify them and reoriented the nozzle, all without any disruption to surrounding plants.

More tenacious weeds that sprout from roots could be pulled out, except that they sometimes break off just below the soil surface, and their roots may pass below plants you'd rather not disturb. An option would be steam injection, through a tube inserted next to the stem. Another option would be coring, removing a cylinder of soil around the stem to a depth of a few inches. Yet another option would be to use electrical current to heat the weed. These are all techniques that a gardener might use, but, except for grabbing ahold of the base of the stem and pulling the plant out, they aren't common.

Compared with weeding, seed planting would be relatively simple. On the other hand, transplanting seedlings started elsewhere would be more challenging, although mechanical systems for this purpose probably already exist and could be used as a model.

Dealing with mid-season issues, like insects and nematodes, microbial infections, plant nutrient deficiencies, and so forth, is hugely complicated, and will require considerable development effort. But small-scale machines have an advantage in that they can deal very specifically with the effected leaf, plant, or location, and also in that, because they would revisit each location frequently, they should be able to catch problems early.

Harvest is also somewhat complicated, since each crop type presents its own set of challenges. What works for wheat doesn't work so well for maize. What works for tomatoes won't be sufficient for pumpkins. Hardware attachments may be needed in some cases.

This vision isn't a fantasy, but there's a lot of work to be done.

why 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 misleading, because it in effect presents the extraction of human attention from the process as a measure of success. They aren't focusing on attention, of course, other than to find ways to spread it thinner, over a larger area of land, because it's expensive.

In this effort to spread human involvement over more area, the first thing out the window is any operation which can't be performed linearly, like plowing, by moving through the field along rows, and the main casualty of this limitation is intensive intercropping. You can mix two or maybe even three crops together in alternate rows in the same field, but not twenty, like you might in your garden; it's just too cumbersome. It's really more convenient to plant just one crop at a time, and as we move upscale, from oxen to tractors pulling implements a hundred feet wide, that convenience becomes a matter of practical necessity, and even minor lack of uniformity in the land itself becomes an annoyance. The result is flattened fields planted to a single crop, as far as the eye can see, and travelers on any highway passing through it hurrying along because it's so boring.

Attention isn't the only thing being extracted in this scenario, so is soil fertility. Tillage, something we've taken for granted for ten thousand years, means unnatural aeration of the soil, which in turn means rapid oxidation of its organic content. Single-cropping means long months of exposure to wind with minimal cover or none at all. The net effect is called "desertification".

So what does all this have to do with robots, and how might they be part of a solution rather than simply making the problem worse?

The simplest definition of a robot is a machine that responds to its environment. The nature of that response might seem trivial in many cases, as in determining the exact position of the tip of a welding rod in relation to the parts being welded and adjusting accordingly, but it's a start, and, as robotic technology advances, more sophisticated responses become possible.

It's unfortunate that the same word, when applied to a human, means exactly the opposite. For this reason I generally refer to "robotics" rather than "robots" to make it more clear that I'm talking about technology in which the acquisition of information and its use in determining the behavior of the machine are essential characteristics, in many cases the most important ones.

It's also unfortunate that "robot" overlaps so much with "android", which refers to human-form robots that mimic human behavior or behave in ways similar to humans. I'm not talking about androids.

What I envision are machines that are designed to move gingerly through thick growth, performing simple operations like planting seeds and pulling weeds, while creating a minimum of disturbance. They might be supported on long, spider-like legs that only ever put weight on particular, gravel-covered spots, or they might be suspended from overhead rails or cables, but they would be engaged in paying detailed attention to what was happening on the ground, including the presence of animals as well as the slow-paced growth of plants, intervening only occasionally as compared with the amount of information they would be processing, although to the casual observer it might look like they were awfully busy.

These machines would have only a modest rate of energy consumption, and might easily get what they need from solar panels, with any excess going to charge batteries that would allow them to continue to operate into the night, and at least keep watch 24/7.

I can only envision such machines, of course, because they don't yet exist.

why 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 factory-like system of crop production that slowly turns fields to deserts with a more nature-compatible and nature-reliant system that can restore fertility.

From a dietary standpoint, the use of robots can vastly increase the variety of crops produced on any piece of land, and help make alternatives to a heavily grain-based diet more affordable.

From the perspective of the consumption of nonrenewable resources, like petroleum, assuming they aren't just doing the same old things, robots can get by on a fraction of the energy spent on tillage, and because they would do their work slowly and continuously instead of all at once, could get much or most of their energy from renewable sources (sun and wind).

There are other reasons, as well as much more to be said about these. I'll get to it in time.

new web page for Cultibotics-related links

I've had a .Mac account for over two years, but am just getting around to setting up the web page aspect of that service. One of the pages I've created there will be dedicated to Cultibotics-related links.

Click here to go there.

getting 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 practices to bear on land management, and most of what there is is happening in Scandinavia, not here in the U.S.

Well, so be it, for now. There is good work being done, and as the variety of off-the-shelf robotic parts continues to increase, the power/price of computer equipment continues to rise steeply, and the economics of current agricultural practice continues to degenerate with rising costs for fuel and other inputs, the scene is gradually being set for a profound transformation in the way we use land to produce food, fiber, and plant materials for the production of synthetic fuels.

There is a danger that we won't get serious about that transformation until the breakdown of current practice is far enough along to cause serious disruption and pain. There is also danger that robotics will first be used to put off real change as long as possible, by simply displacing what few humans remain in an otherwise essentially unchanged system.

On the other hand, there is plenty of opportunity to go around, especially for those who get in on the ground floor and develop the necessary technology to augment generic robotics and create energy-efficient machines designed to perform detailed management of productive land in ways that enhance fertility and repair ecological damage.

The demand for agricultural production isn't going to go away, but we can dramatically change and radically improve the way we go about meeting it, with a far greater return on the R&D dollar than, for example, missile-bearing robotic helicopters.