finding a place for cultibotics in Obama's rural agenda

Essentially the same post also appears on my general purpose blog.

It's not like there was any shortage of ideas for how to improve the stability of U.S. agriculture, the lot of farmers, and the economic vitality of rural America. Just have a look at President-Elect Obama's rural agenda.

What would the ideas encapsulated here look like if embraced by the Obama-Biden team? What might they be called? Here's a few focused statements that occur to me...

• Help insulate farmers and farming regions from dependency on volatile bulk commodity markets by encouraging greater diversity of production.
• Facilitate production improvements through both simultaneous and sequential polyculture.
• Enable farmers to grow more of their own food without need for much time investment or manual labor.
• Reduce the time spent in machine operation.
• Reduce the acreage needed for an economically viable farming operation.
• Reduce the initial investment required to start a farm.
• Provide farmers and their children with high-tech experience.
• Create a demand for skilled technicians and technical instructors in rural areas.
• Create opportunities for rural youth.
• Preserve local crop varieties and experiment with new crops.
• Improve the quality and diversity of locally available produce.
• Reverse the impoverishment of rural culture.
• Reduce exposure to pesticides and pesticide residues.
• Reduce the dependency of agriculture on fossil fuels and feed stocks.
• Reduce contamination of runoff and ground water.
• Reduce and eventually reverse the loss of soil fertility.
• Reduce wind-borne dust.
• Enlist productive land in the efforts to preserve endangered species and provide wildlife habitat.

This list could be far longer, but that should be enough for a sample.

more specifically, how would they work?

This a subject for research and development, of course, but it's my ‘job’ to make this vision as accessible as I can, to both anticipate what that R&D might produce and describe it in plain language.

First, these machines will necessarily have sensory components. Digital cameras and microphones are practically a given, but they may also have infrared imaging, radar and/or laser scanning, chemical sensors to provide something akin to a sense of smell, pressure/stress sensors for a sense of touch, probes for soil moisture, temperature, pH, O2 content, and nutrient availability, weather instruments, and some means of locating themselves very precisely relative to the boundaries of a field or other stationary reference. Compared to most machines, they will have available a rich collection of information about their environments, rich compared even with what human senses provide.

Next, they will have significant computer processing power, sufficient to take the data streams from all of these sensory devices, find patterns in them, compare them with each other and with historical data (including the exact position of every seed and when it was planted), create and update a real time 3-dimensional model of their immediate surroundings, locate items of interest within that model, choose a course of action, and send the detailed instructions to the machine's moving parts, closely monitoring their progress.

Finally, they will have various moving parts, likely including high resolution or specialized sensory components that can be sent in for a closer look. Those moving parts might include a range of grips, from fine tweezers to something strong enough to uproot small trees, mechanical snips, lasers with enough power to fry a meristem, high-pressure water jets capable of slicing through the stem of a plant, fingers to move other plant material out of the way, a vacuum for sampling air at ground level or removing insects, sprinklers and sprayers, trowels of various sizes, and, of course, the soil probes mentioned earlier. Such tools might be combined into sets incorporated into units which could be plugged onto the ends of articulated arms and quickly switched out.

That's a basic outline, but we need to return to the data processing hardware and the code it runs to fill out the picture, since it can make the difference between an expensive toy and a productive machine that more than pays for itself. A major task the processor must perform is resource scheduling, and to do that effectively it must sort actions into those that can be performed without moving anything massive (slow) and without switching out tool units, those which require either movement or a tool switch but must nevertheless be accomplished before moving on, those which can be left until a future pass over the same area but not indefinitely, and those which can be left undone unless it becomes convenient to do them. Efficient scheduling also means mapping the movement of even the smallest parts so they proceed smoothly from one thing to the next, without having to retrace their paths more than is unavoidable.

An important point to be taken away from the previous paragraph is that scrimping on computing hardware and software is likely to prove counterproductive, by reducing the overall capacity of the machine disproportionately. We should expect the computing components to represent a substantial fraction of the overall cost of the machine, and we shouldn't be surprised if they also consume a substantial fraction of its energy budget. Better to invest an extra 10-20% to make a given physical machine capable of performing the work of two, and to invest 1 or 2 kilowatt-hours to save ten.

Something which should be apparent from this mental exercise as a whole is that what's being proposed is largely a simple extrapolation of technologies which already exist. There are already mechanical arms and mechanical grips; there are already sensors and various means of controlling machine operation. What's mainly missing is the software which would turn data streams into a 3-d model in a horticultural context, choose what to do, schedule resources, and map out the details. That's a lot left to be done, requiring a significant investment for a long term payoff, but it's a fairly straightforward problem, and divisible into more manageable chunks. Let's get to it!

imagine a machine built for efficient gardening

What would it look like? How would it be powered, and how would it transmit power to the parts that need it? What actions would it be capable of performing?

There's no single, right answer to these questions. Rather there's a wide range of potential answers, some of which will likely prove more workable than others. Let's look at some of the possibilities.

What would it look like? Almost anything, from a snake-like device slithering along the surface, to what appears to be little more than a single wheel rolling about, to a platform supported by long, spider-like legs, to a beam supported at each end by wheeled trucks. It may turn out that the best arrangement is a mixture of larger and smaller machines, with the larger ones designed to never put their weight on soil being cultivated.

How would it be powered, and how would it transmit power to the parts that need it? They could get their power directly from the grid, from engine-driven generators, from wind generators, from photovoltaic panels, from concentrating solar collectors, or simply from batteries or other energy storage. Any such machine will need at least a small amount of electricity, to power the electronics. Mechanical power could also be electrical, but needn't be. It might be provided via compressed air. Delicate, articulated parts might be moved via fine cables or wires, much as our own fingers are moved by tendons linking to muscles in our forearms.

What actions would it be capable of performing? Planting seeds, of course, beyond that the possibilities are nearly endless, but even the placement of seeds can be accomplished in many ways.

In conventional agriculture, seeds are typically inserted into the soil in rows, through an opening created by a disk (a rotary knife), and covered over by a roller. This is an efficient method of planting a large area to the same crop, or even to a mixture of crops with seeds of approximately the same size, if you don't mind running the planting device and the tractor pulling it over the same soil surface through which the seeds will have to sprout and in which the sprouts will have to grow. Most such planting devices require the soil first be prepared into a seedbed, meaning that plant debris from previous crops must either be turned under, with a plow, or broken down by a combination of tillage, decay, and weathering, to form a relatively uniform surface, easily broken into small particles. A few such planting devices are capable of placing seeds through rough plant debris, rendering the preparation of a seedbed unnecessary, but they're still mainly used to sow a single crop to a large area.

A robotic gardener would also need to be able to place seeds not only through plant debris but between standing plants. It would do so one at a time, perhaps very rapidly, like a sewing machine, but still one at a time, and far more precisely than any bulk planter, positioning them in the most advantageous microenvironments available. Even when planting in bulk, the use of rows would be optional, and in many cases a honeycomb-like pattern might prove preferable.

Weeding might be accomplished by identifying weed seedlings and removing them while still in the sprout stage. Undesirable plants that propagate by root spreading could be controlled by injecting steam below the surface, wherever they appeared. Insects, like aphids, could be controlled by removing infested leaves. Diseases could be controlled by removing infected plants. Nutrient deficiencies could be identified early and treated quickly. If plant debris needed to be reduced to mulch it could be clipped off at ground level and shredded, without disturbing the soil.

In each case the action taken would be local and specific, rather than applied to an entire field, and generally would not involve moving large amounts of soil around, a practice which wastes both energy and soil fertility.

But the essential requirement, without which this whole scenario would be futile and meaningless, is that the machines must operate autonomously, puttering through their days without constant human supervision. They must have both the ability and the latitude to choose what to do next for themselves. Considering they must also operate in uncontrolled environments, this is the greatest challenge.

panning back to the big picture

This blog is about the application of robotic technology (machine intelligence combined with sensory input and operational flexibility) to the performance of horticultural techniques on an agricultural scale, without continuous human supervision, and with relatively low power requirements.

It is about machines bringing to bear not only cropping plans but, eventually, an understanding of plant ecology in choosing their detailed actions, balancing the need for production with other concerns, including the preservation of endangered species.

There is no example I can point to, because only bits and pieces of the technology currently exist.

My role is to point to what could be, what will be if we set our minds to it.

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...