Farm automation, often associated with “smart farming”, is technology that makes farms more efficient and automates the crop or livestock production cycle. An increasing number of companies are working on robotics innovation to develop drones, autonomous tractors, robotic harvesters, automatic watering, and seeding robots. Although these technologies are fairly new, the industry has seen an increasing number of traditional agriculture companies adopt farm automation into their processes. The primary goal of farm automation technology is to cover easier, mundane tasks. Here are some major technologies that are most commonly being utilized by farms.
Harvesting fruits and vegetables have always proven to be a difficult problem to automate. Harvest robots must be gentle with the produce to avoid bruising and damage. Agrobot has successfully developed the first robot for gently harvesting strawberries, no matter where and how they are grown. From a flexible mobile platform, up to 24 robotics manipulators work together to pick the fruit which meets the farmer's quality standard. Another company, Abundant Robotics, is the world's first commercial robotic apple harvest. Their machines handle fragile fruits by using a vacuum instead of any claw or hand-like graspers to pull apples from the branch.
Autonomous tractors can be controlled remotely or even pre-programmed to give full autonomy to a producer. Rabbit Tractor's autonomous tractor delivers value to row crop farmers not just through a reduction in labor costs, but through increased efficiency across operations and increased yield. Tractor automation kits are even being developed by Bear Flag Robotics that makes automation more accessible for farmers by affordably retrofitting existing tractors with cutting edge driverless technology and implement control.
Robotics developed for seeding and weeding can target specific crop areas. In seeding, this can easily reduce labor and mundane tasks on the farm. Weeding robotics can be incredibly accurate and reduce pesticide usage by 90% with computer vision. Blue River Technology employs computer vision and robotics technologies to precisely spray herbicides only where needed and with exactly what's needed. This gives farmers a new way to control and prevent herbicide-resistant weeds. ecoRobotix is another company that produces a weeding robot -- this is the first ever completely autonomous machine for a more ecological and economical weeding of row crows, meadows, and intercropping cultures.
Drones can be used to monitor conditions remotely and even apply fertilizers, pesticides, and other treatments from above. They can also quickly and cost-effectively identify problem areas with imagery and infrared analysis to help farmers diagnose issues early on. American Robotics is developing a fully autonomous “Robot-as-a-service” with an autonomous drone, base station, and analytics platform that provides insights to growers at resolutions, frequencies, and speeds never before possible.