a patent, its implications, and their implications

The post that initially appeared here has been moved to Lacy Ice + Heat, which is where I meant to put it in the first place.

precise air-stream control

References to fictional, mystical warriors notwithstanding, this could actually be useful.

contrasting two robotic developments

The first is an autonomous agricultural robot that you can actually buy, or will be able to soon. It runs on gas and will cost around $100,000 when it becomes available early next year. FHI claims the machine can grow fruit and vegetables independently, although this is difficult to imagine based on the one available photo.

The second is the combination of a robotic hand possessing touch sensitivity and quick, flexible movement with a fast vision system, allowing some rather amazing manipulations of objects (check out the video!).

Of the two, the latter provides me far more hope for the future of robotic land management. A pair of hands like that, mounted on comparably quick arms, themselves mounted on a mobile platform, could be expected to cover every square foot of a several acre plot, every day, performing mechanical operations like planting, weeding, pruning, and harvesting. This represents a significant head start on the necessary hardware.

It's becoming clear that the hardware development will pretty much take care of itself, as basic abilities like this are developed and combined. The software may require more focused effort; probably will.

Le Petit Prince takes attentiveness to an extreme

Are your plants suffering from lack of attention? Perhaps this little robot is what you need. Unfortunately, you'll need a few thousand of them if you plan to do any serious gardening.

cool blog: The Infrastructurist

Here's something to add to your bookmarks: The Infrastructurist.

cultibotics as a quality of life issue

Your typical farm raises at most a few crops, frequently only one. Because it's what I know, and because it's in practically every processed food you can buy, let's take wheat as an example.

Wheat comes in two main growing patterns, winter and spring. Winter wheat is planted in early fall, where winters are relatively mild, grows to a lawn-like few inches in height before winter, and then resumes growing as winter recedes, and is ready for harvest in late spring or early summer. Spring wheat is planted in late winter or early spring and is ready for harvest in late summer or early fall. Either way the ground looks much like a disaster zone between harvest and replanting, especially with old-school tillage which begins with plowing under the stubble from the last crop, and, like most disaster zones, it's a prolific source of dust. To live in wheat country is to live with a landscape in this mutilated condition several months out of each year.

The fault isn't so much with the technology in use (aside from the choice of tillage regimes), but is rather a result of monoculture, the planting of a single crop year after year. Even using standard tillage practices, something as simple as a crop rotation system might have wheat harvest immediately followed by the planting of something else, clover for instance. However, much of wheat country gets insufficient rainfall to support more than one crop per year. In fact, without irrigation, one crop every two years is more common on the high plains, meaning that even during the height of growing season half the land under cultivation continues to look desolate and contribute to the dust-load in the lower atmosphere, at the cost of some of its own fertility.

Nothing about the equipment in common use precludes crop rotations, and row cropping systems can manage two, or even three crops in the ground at the same time, but three is about the limit. Using conventional methods, intermixing a dozen or more species, other than for pasture or hay, is unthinkable, no matter what benefit might result. So is continuous cropping unthinkable. You can grow pumpkins among the corn stalks in the fall and snow peas climbing up them in the early spring, but sooner or later you'll need to turn under the debris, if not to prepare a seed bed for more corn then to keep the thistles in check.

For continuous cropping, you need more deft handling of soil and plant materials than implements pulled by tractors can provide; you need something more like what a gardener does.

With continuous cropping there's always something in the ground to break the wind and keep down the dust, and while the field will never have the look of ripe crop of monoculture wheat, all ready for harvest at once, it will also never look like a desert, nor, with proper handling, like a thistle patch.

What you get is a landscape that's more varied throughout the year, but not so starkly punctuated by season.

What you also get is more variety in production. Instead of wheat, wheat, and more wheat you might also get squash, beans, onions, peppers, millet, and so forth, as well as perennials like sand plums, apricots, currents, and mulberries, all the makings of a healthy diet.

The key to making this possible is dexterity combined with attention to detail, such as could only, until recently, be supplied by people. The key to making it practical is robotics.

To the extent there is any close connection between the quality of land management and the quality of life that land supports, it follows that the quality of life achievable through the best available land management method will be better than what can be achieved without it.

You cannot economically duplicate, by any other means, the quality of land management that is achievable through the appropriate application of robotics.

of thresholds and the forces that drive change

"But why would you want to turn farming over to machines?"

Ahem! Farming has been conducted primarily by machines for going on a hundred years, at least in the United States. I want to substitute intelligent machines that proceed carefully and work continuously for big, dumb machines that are designed to get the job over with as quickly as possible, and at the same time move farmers out of their roles as machine operators and into the roles of technician and manager.

The threshold that still looms large but is shrinking with every passing week, primarily due to advancements in military robotics, is autonomous operation, making it possible for one person to manage many machines simultaneously, instead of being symbiotically fused to one for the entire time it is in operation.

At some point in the not too distant future, it will become practical to turn tractors loose under robotic control, but by the time that happens that same threshold will already have been crossed by less powerful, less dangerous machines. Moreover, once tractors arrive at autonomous operation there's not much to drive further development. Sure, you can push efficiency higher and accident rates lower, but it's still the same old thing.

With the sort of detail-oriented systems I've been attempting to imagine and describe, that threshold of autonomous operation is just the beginning, the spark that lights the rocket. Knowledge that would be of no use to autonomous tractors, because they'd still just be pulling implements around a field, could improve the performance of machines using a horticultural approach and improve the productivity of land they tend, and much of that knowledge they would be able to discern for themselves, through experience (statistics applied to crop measurements) and sharing information with each other.

For every increment in sensory capability, processing power, mechanical versatility, and software sophistication there would be a potential payoff, in machine performance, productivity, and/or the quality of the overall result.

That's what a growth market looks like.