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.

The Robotics of Place

The following is only slightly reworked from three posts I wrote, one after the other, in 1999. These posts together formed the starting point of a topic with the surprising title "The Robotics of Place" (originally in The WELL's Whole Earth conference).

Don't let the title scare you off. There's more here than might at first be apparent.

There's much to suggest that the original condition of human beings was nomadic - maybe over a fairly limited range, but seldom entirely sedentary.

First farming, then cities, with the investment of time and effort they embody, made moving about with the seasons less appealing. But in modern times
we seem to have replaced both nomadism and attachment to place with a sort of serial squatting, staying a few months in one place and a few years in
another, but generally without the deep connections that come from spending one's whole life in the same place and among the same people.

But we aren't likely to ween ourselves from dependence on stationary infrastructure anytime soon, not even with the recently booming popularity of mobile devices, and in that realization is the germ of the thought I hope to develop here: people want the benefits of infrastructure, without being bogged down by it.

And, increasingly so as time goes on, infrastructure means not just brick and mortar, but something active.

Asimov described a planet sparsely inhabited by people who were heavily dependent on technology, who each had substantial land holdings which were cared for by robots.

All very scifi, but the connection between machine and place rings true.

Most of us cringe at the idea of a life devoted to looking after a plot of ground, yet the ground needs looking after, particularly in and near cities. How strange is it really to propose that machines will inherit this task, probably sooner rather than later?

Here are some examples of familiar technological intrusions on the landscape: roads, bridges, dams, irrigation ditches, water and sewer lines, storm drains, tilled fields, fences, hedgerows, terraces, power lines, rail beds, mines, harvested forests (and those replanted with less than their original diversity), not to mention buildings.

We've never much hesitated to impose our notions on the world around us, but until recently we did so personally, typically using the biggest time-saving levers we could find. Only we (and a few domesticated allies, like sheepdogs) could provide the element of attentive activity, for lack of which one built environment after another has reverted back to a wild state, generally an impoverished one. We're good at dreaming up grand designs, and we like having things neat and tidy, but we tire of maintenance, and are more than a little stingy about paying for it.

In suggesting that we embrace a robotic approach to land maintenance, I'm also implying an eventual end to capricious land use, with grand new schemes equating to changes in programming that would result in gradual modifications of the landscape, rather than sudden, gaping scars that take decades to heal.

For discussion, go to the Cultibotics Group.

balancing a blog and a group

As already mentioned elsewhere, until recently I'd been something of an online recluse, confining my nonpassive participation almost exclusively to The Well, although I've had some web presence there for most of the time since late 1995.

Then, last summer, I ventured out, and in short order accumulated a MySpace account (since canceled), a Google Group, and three Blogger blogs, including this one. Luckily, I quit adding new projects as soon as I began to feel overwhelmed, so the result turns out to be manageable, although it didn't feel like it for awhile.

Anyway, to get to the point, I've decided to attempt to maintain all four of these projects.

For this blog, since it's on the same topic as the group, I've turned off comments. I'll post ideas and news both here and in the group, and encourage anyone moved to reply to go to the group to do so, since the tools provided there better support discussion.

For the time being, you can view the Cultibotics Group using the new, improved, beta version of the Google Groups software via this link.

not out of nothing: what prompted this blog

As already mentioned, the general idea of applying robotics to the detailed management of productive land has been batting around in my head for years, and I've gone on about it at some length on various occasions, generally behind the walls of The WELL.

Not all of The WELL hides behind a wall, of course. (see "Guest-readable Conferences"), and, as it happens, one recent example (see last paragraph) happened in a world-viewable conference.

cultibotics group

There's been some recent activity in the Cultibotics Group, so I'm now pondering how to handle both a group and a blog.

I think what's going to happen is that the blog becomes a condensed version of what's posted in the group, with new material occasionally appearing here first, but not necessarily so.

I'll aim to keep the information density high here; that much I'm sure of.

open source robotics toolkits

IBM developerWorks is a great resource.

This article discusses open source software for modeling and testing robotic designs in software.

(Found on AI Buzz.)

four football fields...every single blade of grass

Think I'm crazy in suggesting in suggesting that a machine could track every single plant over an area of several acres? This Digg item says this experimental camera can image "every single blade of grass" over an area of "four football fields" in one shot.

Granted that they're using chemical film in the camera itself, but that film is scanned as soon as it's processed, and all subsequent image manipulation is done digitally. The file resulting from a full-resolution scan of one such film is 24 GB, which does push the limits of current technology a bit.

While really not at all the same as what a cultibot would do in cataloging all of the plants within the area it tended, this does suggest that the level of complexity involved is within the reach of either current technology or what's just around the corner. Maybe the database for a five-acre plot would occupy a few terabytes, but even that isn't unmanageable.