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.
