As the global population increases, pressure is mounting on our food systems to feed the predicted 10 billion people inhabiting Earth by 2050. The growing population, rise of AI, and new developments in robotics have caused the world of agriculture robotics to explode with innovation. Advances in agricultural technology may provide alternative farming methods that are less damaging and more productive.
Traditionally, farmers spray pesticides across the whole field as a preventative measure. However, having greater insight into a field’s entire health means crops can be treated only if they need to be if they can analyze, contemplate, and carry out a multitude of functions. They can be programmed to grow and evolve to match the needs of various tasks.
Then, farmers can use fewer pesticides, preserve resources, and reduce costs once they can analyze, contemplate, and carry out many functions. They can be programmed to grow and evolve to match the needs of various tasks. An aerial image of farmland can also reveal issues that may otherwise have gone unnoticed, such as poor irrigation, soil variation, and pest problems.
Emerging applications of robots or drones in agriculture include weed control, cloud seeding, planting seeds, harvesting, environmental monitoring, and soil analysis. Robots can use complex camera systems to target and weed, hoe, and assist during harvesting paired with an advanced AI system, they cannot only pick strawberries but it’s also able to identify the ripeness of the fruit.
Then, a wedding robot with a few pairs of very precise grasping devices that can harvest target crops now sits on a tall, leggy-wheeled frame structure and would be deployed from data provided by AI. Now, imagine how a fleet of these robots can easily replace human farm labor. The main brunt of the automation of robots in agriculture today lies in harvesting. On average, one farming tractor robot can now do in a day what used to take 100 people a week.
In the past, farmers coped with the growing demand for increased productivity with bigger, heavier agricultural machinery. While these machines offer many benefits to the agriculture industry, they can significantly affect soil quality and limit plant growth. This causes soil compaction, significantly damaging the soil’s health by restricting oxygen and nutrients, and can subsequently hinder plant development. Now, smaller and lighter robots can crawl the fields to remove and kill weeds. Rather than using a sprayer to mass spray the crops, these robots use sensors and surveillance to identify, select and spray weeds directly with pesticides. Reducing pesticide use and avoiding soil compaction.
The unique size of these tiny, lightweight DC servo motors, including ASSUN MOTOR’s micromotors, is now encapsulated into the mechanism of these precision robots to determine how the food industry can carefully maneuver delicately between rows of crops that will determine the future of mankind. And it is because the stakes are so high that such agricultural robots are here to stay.
