abandoned railway roadbeds

In the Emma Marris video linked below, there appears to be an abandoned railway roadbed in the background. Such spaces almost automatically return to nature, left to themselves for a few years, but if the rails haven't been removed they are ideal testbeds for robotic equipment designed to guide, elaborate, and accelerate that process.

Besides the usual gardening techniques, such machines could move some soil and gravel from the rail-bed around to create microclimates with various shading/exposure, slope, drainage, water collection and/or even distribution across a flat bottom. They could weave vines together to create sheltered spaces for small birds, train high branches of trees from both sides of the rail-bed to arch overhead, creating deep shade by tying them together, position art objects intended to provide habitat for mice, birds, and bats and anchor them with soil and gravel. These machines could also assist other species in the creation of their preferred shelters, for instance by digging a bit of a hollow at the bases of trees with roots that spread abruptly just under the surface, or providing platforms in the forks of tree branches, just big enough to support proper nests, constructed of sticks and twine.

Emphasis on avian habitat would mean faster accumulation of a diversity of plant species, because birds frequently pass the seeds of berries they've eaten through, undigested. And, because the seeds of berries preferred by birds predominate, the result is a positive feedback loop.

Such machines could also provide damage-free access to the resulting space through inclusion of observation decks on top of the robotic rail platforms. If several such machines are to be spread along a single rail-bed, they should be designed so that they are able to approach each other closely enough that their observation decks come together, allowing riders to step across from one to another.

Emma Marris: Rambunctious Garden

While I fully expect Emma Marris would deem the use of robots to create her Rambunctious Garden a distraction, and my contention that robotics is necessary to the achievement of sustainability non-obvious, at best, I still must consider her an ally, for preaching the gospel of making the best of what we have left.

My hope is that the goal of rewilding can be interwoven with that of producing food, fiber, and fuel, on a grand scale, through the creation and application of robotic systems of land management capable of nurturing crop plants through their entire life cycles while leaving neighboring plants undisturbed.

the importance of robotics to the achievement of sustainability

In a mid-August post bearing the same title, on my primary blog, I stated:

I firmly believe that (short of convincing the vast majority of people to return to subsistence farming, something which could only be accomplished through intense coercion) robotics is vitally important to achieving sustainability.

Realizing others' mileage might vary, I took that post to a conferencing system I've been on for over twenty years and asked whether the notion seemed counterintuitive to anyone there. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it did. In fact, I was probably the only participant in the conversation for whom the idea wasn't at least a bit odd.

Understand that we're not talking about your standard social network fare, here. The other participants in the conversation are, to a person, all intelligent and (otherwise) well informed.

Seeing that the conversation had pretty well run its course, I concluded with the following:

It's unfortunate that so much of robotics is weapons research, and even more unfortunate that the associations most people have with robots and robotics is of clunky machines that are unintentionally dangerous.

The clunkiness is a passing phase, and already an anachronism in many cases, but I can see why some prefer to avoid the word "robot", talking instead about intelligent or adaptive machines. In Japan they speak of RTs, Robotic Technologies, which makes for a nice refocusing in my humble opinion. Robotic technologies find there way into all sorts of objects not usually considered robots.

A more general restatement of the proposition I laid out [here] would be that robotic technologies are essential to the achievement of sustainability. This might be an easier sell, however I really do mean robots, complete with interchangeable manipulators on the ends of arms with at least a few degrees of freedom, and operation that is sufficiently autonomous to break the 1-to-1 correspondence between machine and operator, with the machines conceivably running 24/7 during the busiest season (and maybe drawing some power from the grid to keep them running through the night).

It's my belief that the use of such machines is the only way we'll ever manage to bring best practices to the vast majority of land in production, and that the best that is possible without them will prove unsustainable in the long run.

That this point of view was at least initially counterintuitive for the unusually astute social environment in which I posed it means to me that there's still a great deal of work to be done to repair the perceptual damage done by the preponderance of robot portrayals in fiction and to jumpstart creative imagination for how autonomous machinery might help us surmount the difficult challenges before us.

agricultural robotics and employment

At least with regard to agriculture, the effect of robotics upon employment depends on the approach taken. If your goal is to further reduce the number of people deriving an income from farming, and you are willing to accept any other sort of expense to that end (autonomous tractors for instance), then you can probably manage to reduce the percentage of the workforce engaged in agricultural production to an even smaller fraction of 1%.

If your goal is to maximize the production of those crops that are easily produced and handled in bulk and survive long-term storage well, in the interest of generating return on capital investment and foreign exchange, and only care about how it's done insofar as that impacts the bottom line, you might conclude that capital expenditures to further minimize payroll would generally not be cost effective, that it would cost more to replace the remaining workforce than to keep it.

However, if you're interested in guaranteeing the sustainability of production far into the future, despite climate change, while also halting soil loss, ending the use of poisons, preserving remaining diversity in both crop and native genomes, and rebalancing production for healthier diets, you may need both more sophisticated machinery and all the people you can recruit.

Such a complicated goal implies complex operations, and complex operations imply a large variety of tasks, some easily mechanized and others common enough to make mechanization worthwhile, even though challenging. Those that are neither common nor easily mechanized will fall to human workers, farmers and farmhands, who are far more adaptable than any machine.

At some point in the future it may become possible to build machines adaptable enough to take the place of a farmer, but until the annual cost of ownership of such a machine drops below the annual cost of one human worker, it won't make economic sense to deploy them, and without an infrastructure to drive down the cost of robotics, that may never happen.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really follow the gossip about the House of Windsor. Oh, you can't help but hear about the biggest items, like the recent wedding, but I've mainly been content to leave them what little privacy they might manage. I did see "The King's Speech" and learned more from it than I'd known prior to seeing it. One consequence of this lack of attention has been that I've had a rather sketchy view of Prince Charles, one lacking any notion of whatever depth the man possesses.

So imagine my surprise when he turns out to be not only a serious fellow, but one with whom I share a deep concern. As reported in the New York Times blog Green, Prince Charles spoke earlier today at a Georgetown University conference on the future of food and sustainable agriculture. According to that report, he gave an earnest and statistics-heavy address touching on such staples of the natural food movement as the virtues of composting and the need to maintain biodiversity. A bit further on it says he focused on current methods of mechanized factory farming and meat production, saying they were depleting the soil, devouring water supplies, exacerbating climate change and poisoning streams and oceans. ... He said that such methods, heavily dependent on fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, produced unhealthy foods and drove small local growers out of business. ... He said that the world faced the challenge of feeding a population rapidly headed toward nine billion people without destroying the environment that humans depend on.

Wow! Right on!

I think I've got at least the outline of a partial solution here, in the vision laid out in this blog, using robotics to make it possible to leave behind the worst aspects of conventional agriculture and to enable a new set of practices. That new set of practices could be sustainable, although the use of robotics per se doesn't guarantee that it will be. We, as farmers, as technologists, as entrepreneurs, as investors, as regulators, as representatives, as citizens, and as consumers, must insist on a version of the future that is sustainable. We must cooperate to hold the feet of those who see private advantage in the least possible change to the fire of unrelenting necessity.

from despair to renewed hope to expectation

I'm well aware that the tone of most of the posts here is fairly dark, that many of them come from a place of failed hope. The main reason for this is that I wasn't well plugged into current activities (research...) in robotics, and wasn't aware that they continued to include elements of progress in a direction I'd term 'hopeful'.

In the last few months this state of affairs has turned around dramatically, and I've moved from despair to renewed hope to expectation that something approximating the vision I've laid out here will actually happen, is already underway in point of fact. The questions which remain are how quickly it will proceed, and the degree to which the result will embrace concerns not directly related to crop production.

Some Things Can't Be Done Without Robots

I had pretentions of being a back-to-the-land hippy before I ever became seriously interested in robotics, but my brother successfully popped that bubble with a simple, unarguable observation, that most people don't want to go back to subsistence farming. So far as that went, he was right, but that didn't make the abusive practices of modern agriculture acceptable. I didn't have an answer, but I kept looking for one.

I had a pretty good idea of what computing was about from an introduction to CS class in which we wrote FORTRAN programs on cardpunches. At that scale there was no help to be found from that direction, but the advent of the microprocessor changed everything. Suddenly it became thinkable to have mobile devices each with its own electronic brain. My mind reeled with the possibilities, but there were a million unknowns.

One thing was clear, though, if Moore's Law was even close to being correct it wouldn't be long before the speed of the electronics was no longer the hangup. It would be the mechanical designs, the software, much of which would depend on transforming biological knowledge into computer code, and the chicken/egg problem of creating an industry and a market for that industry's products at the same time.

And that's pretty much where we are now. The speed of the electronics has so far exceeded the other pieces of the puzzle that even if we might wish for still more it's a moot point. We're not putting what's available to good use.

Remember, we're talking here about getting what we need from the land while honoring the back-to-the-land aesthetic of living lightly upon it, as a species, but not about people fleeing the cities to scratch out their personal livelihoods with whatever meager assemblage of skills they might manage to collect. That could be more destructive than factory farms.

The solution, really the only possible solution if we're to stop soil erosion, ground water and stream contamination, the loss of biodiversity, and the gutting of rural culture, is robots. That's right, robots.

Only by substituting machines which can be invested with some understanding of ecology, or which are at least well suited to play a role in an ecologically sound approach, for the dumb machines currently in use, can we have it all, our comfortable lives, a reliable supply of food of varied types, and a clear conscience.

I'd love to be telling you about all of the cool developments in cultivation robotics, how this team had succeeded in building a system that could differentiate between closely related species immediately upon sprouting, and how another had created a tiny robot that ran on the body fluids of the aphids it consumed. I wish I could report that the USDA had funded research into intermingling rare and endangered native species with crop species and making room for moderate wildlife populations without sacrificing too much commercial productivity. Heh, at least I can truthfully say it could happen, which seemed pretty far fetched just one year ago.

Realistically, though, nearly all of that sort of work remains to be done, and it'll be a great ride when it finally does begin to happen!

Crossposted from my blog on Robots.net