Australian research organization's description of Agricultural Robotics

On a web page describing their current efforts in agricultural robotics, CSIRO ICT Centre describes the focus area this way:

The application of field robotics to agriculture is an emerging area of interest for our researchers. The increasing demands on our agricultural sector are forcing farmers to consider robotic assistance where before they worked alone. In recent years GPS guided tractors have become commercially available and are now seen commonly in many countries in the world. These systems still rely on the farmer to supervise them - normally from tractor's cab. It is hoped that the next generation of farm robots will be more aware of their immediate surroundings and will be capable of mapping obstacles and navigating autonomously. Unlike field robotics in other domains such as mining or the military (where safety and the removal of people from hazardous situations is a major driver), agricultural robotics will only make sense when the business case means that using robots will save money when compared to farming in a traditional manner.

IPM: Integrated Pest Management

The concept of Integrated Pest Management has been around for several decades, and is just as useful in a robotic, no-till scenario as it is combined with conventional, traction-based agriculture, perhaps even more so. In a nutshell, it's about the inclusion of biological controls in a mix of methods that can also include mechanical and chemical controls. The use of barn owls in the video below is an excellent example.

reforming agriculture through more sophisticated mechanization

Historically, at least since the mechanization of agriculture began in earnest, there have been two primary measures of agricultural productivity, the amount that could be grown on a given acreage and the percentage of the population required to feed all of us. The former, measured in bushels or tons per acre, has generally been increasing and the latter, measured in man-hours per bushel or ton, decreasing for at least the last hundred years, albeit more so for some crops than for others. (A consequence of the decreasing need for labor to produce many staples has been the migration of the children of farmers to cities, where they helped keep the cost of labor low in other enterprises.)

Corn (maize) is a good example of a crop for which these conventional measures of productivity tell a story of brilliant progress, with the result that corn is cheap enough to use not only as livestock feed, to be converted into meat and dairy products, but as the feedstock for production of ethanol for fuel, competing with fuels refined from petroleum pumped from the ground, rather remarkable considering that corn kernels represent only a small fraction of the biomass of a corn plant and that fermentation and distillation aren't particularly efficient processes.

Crops that fair less well by these measures include many vegetables and most fruits, which have been becoming gradually more expensive, especially as compared with grains that are easily handled mechanically, but even compared with meat and dairy products from grain-fed livestock. One major consequence of this has been that people generally consume more grains, meat, and dairy products, and less fruit and vegetables than they once did, before the mechanization juggernaut got started and while vegetable gardens were still common.

So, by an altogether different measure, how healthy the average diet is, mechanization has been a disaster, so far. I say "so far" because the essential problem is that, so far, mechanization has favored crops consisting of hard, dry seeds, that are easily handled in bulk, making other crops needed for a balanced diet relatively less affordable. In happier economic times this would matter less, as people would simply pay the premium for a healthier diet, but the times being what they are people are scrimping however they can, including with the food they consume.

There are other ways of measuring productivity: energy use*, soil gain or loss*, water use and contamination*, and the degree to which a given practice denies space to native flora and habitat to native fauna. By any of these measures, conventional mechanization comes out looking at least shortsighted if not dimwitted.

*(per unit produced)

So is the answer to turn back the clock on agricultural technology, to replace the plow with the hoe and the drill with the planting stick? I'm not prepared to make that argument - although I've no doubt others would - aside from noting that gardens are a better use of many urban spaces than are lawns, and there is no further need for rural communities to supply cities with cheap labor, since those cities are already well supplied, and many rural areas suffer from depopulation.

Instead, my position is that we need to take mechanization to the next level, replacing dumb machines suited only to bulk operations with smart machines capable of performing well-informed, detailed manipulations, for example controlling weeds by selectively pulling them from the ground or pest caterpillars by picking them from plants (unless they've already been parasitized, as by wasps) rather than by applying poisons.

Given machinery with an adequate array of sensors and a sufficiently broad range of optional actions, applying best practices becomes a matter of mating these with processing power connected to an expert system, and of programming.

It gets better, because the same system that works the land can be used to improve the expert system through experimentation and, in routine operation, by accumulation of data to which statistical methods can be applied, and can also be used to improve the crops themselves, as for instance by leaving the best formed, most insect resistant cabbages to go to seed.

The bottom line is that this approach can make available the mechanical equivalent of an attentive expert gardener, at a cost, given predictable economies of scale, that would make possible the wholesale replacement of conventional, traction-based machinery and methods with more adaptable machinery bringing a whole new repertoire of methods to bear, one far better suited to the production of the fruits and vegetables that have been becoming unaffordable under the current regime.

As for the other measures of productivity mentioned above, such machinery, since it wouldn't need to turn soil in bulk and could operate long hours without continuous supervision, would consume energy at a relatively low rate, suitable for supply from solar panels or via the grid from renewable sources. It could operate through continuous ground cover, all but eliminating soil loss, and with minimal use or complete non-use of herbicides and pesticides, reducing soil and water contamination. Ground cover, mulch, and the humus accumulating from decaying roots can also reduce the need for irrigation, and the ability to create local varieties through seed selection based on the health of maturing plants can further reduce it, as well as helping to adapt more quickly to climate change. Making room for native species, something that can only be accomplished in conventional practice by leaving land completely undisturbed, becomes a matter of programming the system to leave certain species alone, wherever it finds them, even to the extent of tolerating some crop loss to native fauna, and to leave anything it can't identify alone until it can be identified.

Such machinery might not be able to compete with conventional practice in the production of corn and other bulk commodities, at least to start with, but it also wouldn't consume prodigious amounts of petroleum-based fuels. Moreover, development and rapid deployment of such machinery would drive the growth of a new, potentially domestic industry, one that would also work to the benefit of materials recycling efforts, more efficient transportation, and on and on.

The R-word I haven't yet mentioned is robotics. While such machines probably aren't what most people first think of when robots are mentioned, their creation and production falls squarely within the discipline of robotics, composed as they would necessarily be from robotic technologies.

Reposted from Lacy Ice + Heat

monitoring fields with UAVs

They're using radio-controlled aircraft rather than autonomous machines, but it's still a big improvement over the time spent walking fields or the lack of detail that comes from only checking the edges of a field. I expect further improvements with the introduction of better sensors and on-board controllers.

Crossposted from Lacy Ice + Heat

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.