center-pivot tillage system

Thanks to Jan Slinsky for posting this YouTube video showing a center-pivot system used for tilling a small plot of land.

While requiring more energy than tillage-free management would, this system has the advantage of operating directly on electricity, meaning that there's no necessary dependency on petroleum to keep it running. It has two electric motors, which appear to be in the 2-3 horsepower range. Using both, its maximum power requirement should be no higher than 5 KW. Using just the motor that drives the wheel at the end of the rotating beam, which would be the more common case, the maximum power requirement should be no higher than 2.5 KW.

It also has the advantage of being usable now. In fact, to judge by the video, it appears to already have been in regular use for several seasons.

the origin of cultibotics in science fiction

To be quite truthful, the dream of having robots take over the task of managing productive land isn't really mine in the sense of having originated it. To be sure I've contributed some detail, but others dreamt it before myself.

The best example of which I'm aware, Robert Silverberg's The World Inside, describes a world divided between urban towers and the land between them. The land between is tended by machines which are themselves tended by people, a rural population with a very different culture from that found in the urban towers.

While the world Silverberg describes is more of a dystopia than a utopia, not least because it is fast approaching limits that it steadfastly denies, that aspect of the book, the use of intelligent machines to enable a superior grade of land management than could be achieved without them, rings true.

Reading that book was most likely the beginning of my own obsession with the subject, although I don't clearly remember how it started.

an idea the time for which is growing closer

When I first started thinking about the use of sophisticated robotics on the front line of horticulture/agriculture, performing most or all field operations autonomously, in a detailed manner, I figured it would already have happened by now, or at least be well underway. In any case it was just a question of when, not if; the logic was too compelling to be ignored. Now I'm less confident, although still hopeful.

Clearly I badly misestimated some factor: the rate of progress in computing and robotics, the difficulty of adapting these technologies to the array of tasks involved, the tremendous momentum of business as usual once it becomes a matter of money rather than simply conventional practice, or the degree to which others might share the vision that was burning in my brain.

If anything, I underestimated the rate of progress in computing, which has been going gangbusters since the invention of the personal computer, almost without a break. On the other hand, I probably overestimated the rate of progress in robotics. There's been quite a bit, but we're not yet to the point where you can assemble a complete machine for practically any purpose from readily available parts in stock; that time is still coming, but it isn't here yet.

I think I'm a realist about business momentum. I understand the deep conservatism that guides most investment, and the heavily conventional nature of most marketing types, allowing for only incremental change. No surprises there.

What's left is the difficulty of adapting technology and the degree to which others might comprehend and share my vision, two factors I believe to be connected in a sort of chicken-egg (which comes first) relationship.

It's easier to imagine a field being managed by robotic machinery if you have an example of such a machine sitting in front of you. On the other hand it's easier to think about building such a machine if you have a clear idea of what all it's supposed to be able to do, and how fast it will have to work to succeed, with what safeguards - basic design parameters.

Lacking the means to contribute much in the way of machine design, I've concentrated on elaborating and pushing the vision, hoping others better positioned to work on the hardware might become interested. I've also made a couple of false starts in the direction of working to build a community of experimenters, and continue to mull over how best to go about this.

So, for the time being, what you can expect from this blog is further exploration of the vision, and a lot less of the sort of navel-gazing found in this and previous posts.

When there's news to share regarding the development of a community, I'll post it here. Until then, welcome to my dream...

WSIC: knowing the right search term is golden

WSIC is an acronym with multiple interpretations, one of which is relevant here. For our purposes, it means "wide-span implement carrier" and refers to a category of machine wherein the components that do useful work are suspended from a beam (gantry) which is supported by wheeled tractors (trucks) at either end.

This arrangement allows the positioning of the active components over any portion of a strip of land as wide as the machine's span and of indefinite length, while confining its wheels to narrow, widely spaced tracks, which can be graveled to mitigate damage.

Aside from the suspended components, it might be thought of as a vehicle with very wide track and relatively short wheelbase.

While such a machine might weigh as much as a conventional tractor, that weight would largely be relatively inexpensive extruded or rolled materials, welded together, as opposed to cast or forged parts with machined surfaces.

the long, slow tipping point, or boiling frogs

It's said that if you raise the temperature slowly enough you can boil a frog alive and it will never jump out of the pot. True or not, it illustrates the idea of changes that happen so gradually we scarcely realize they're happening and may fail to recognize when the accumulated change adds up to something qualitatively different.

In the context of agriculture and the potential for applying robotic technology to its improvement, this principle applies at least two ways.

The first of these, because it is happening regardless of anything else, is how agriculture has been changing over recent decades, and how the human culture of farming, rural society and the rural landscape, the robustness or fragility of the crops themselves, soil fertility, and biodiversity have changed as a result.

This is something of a mixed bag. For example, on the one hand you have a proliferation of poisonous substances used to control various pest species, but on the other you have the growing popularity of Integrated Pest Management, which uses them sparingly. And while some of the practices which became ubiquitous in the wake of the dust bowl have since become less common, the rising cost of fuel works in favor of lighter tillage, leaving some stubble, which helps control erosion.

Nevertheless, this situation looks rather bleak overall, particularly given the heavy dependence of agriculture on fuel and other products derived from petroleum, and a comparison between ourselves and the frog in the gradually warming water is a bit too apropos.

The other way in which the slow accumulation of change applies is in the development of the various tools and technologies needed for robotics in general to flourish. The array of what's available for use is already good and getting better, if not quite rapidly then at least inexorably, and the more complete the toolkit the more applications become economically feasible, further accelerating the pace of development. At some point that logic is bound to take hold, powerfully and irreversibly, if not this year then maybe next year, or the year after, or maybe it's already begun and just happening slowly enough that it's hard to see.

Here too the boiling frog applies, in that the robotics industry could flourish without contributing anything significant to the improvement of agriculture. It could simply fail to live up to that particular potential, there being no shortage of other, more clearly profitable potentials to be chased after, and plenty of encouragement from DARPA with regard to military applications.

Here we are in the pot, with the general state of agriculture growing ever more tenuous and the industry with the power to transform that situation taking no notice, much less recognizing its all-important role.

cultibotics and nutrition

A very long time ago, 1981 to be precise, I intended to pursue a masters degree in agronomy, with a focus on how well various agricultural systems supported balanced nutrition for those dependent upon them. I didn't even last through the first semester, assembling the prerequisites, but that was the goal I was aiming at.

Fast forward to 2008.

Take your standard recommendations as to what constitutes a balanced diet; work up a meal plan for a week, and from that a shopping list; go to any supermarket and price out your shopping list. You'll find that some items, basically those that can be grown and harvested without the use of hand cultivation, are relatively inexpensive, and others, those requiring manual labor for at least one step in the process of getting the crop to market, are relatively more expensive. It's all too tempting to just go for the less expensive items and leave out the more expensive items, maybe using vitamin supplements to make up for what's missing, maybe not.

This is a hidden cost of current agricultural practice, that it makes a nutrition-poor survival diet relatively inexpensive, while a really balanced diet is unaffordable to many.

Intensive cultivation using robotic land management could do a lot to make currently expensive produce, and therefore a balanced diet, more affordable.

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.