Driverless Tractors and Drones to be Among the Key Applications for Agricultural Robots

The worldwide market for the agricultural robot has seen a boost in 2015 and many new products that are in field tests are expected to be commercially available by 2016.

ATI Introduces Bird Deterrent Solution for Its Line of Precision Ag Drones

The Raptor Module sonically emits patterns mimicking various birds of prey with altering flight patterns, providing farmers with a low cost solution to a traditionally difficult problem.

Advances in farming robotics could address shortage in agricultural workers

By Steve Brachmann for IPWatchDog: More and more, the agricultural world is looking towards the mechanization of labor processes through robotics as a way of potentially increasing their productivity. Robotics was identified as a sector of investment growth in agricultural tech by an April 2014 white paper on agriculture technologies published by the entrepreneurship and education non-profit Kauffman Foundation. Robotics is a regular focus of ours here on IPWatchdog, most recently visited in our coverage of the incredible advancements in walking and jumping robotics pioneered by Boston Dynamics, a Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary. With American farmers already heavily involved in the regulatory conversation involving the commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, we thought that it would be interesting to delve into the world of farming robotics and see the recent advances in that particular field. Its important to understand first that the robotics being developed for commercial use on farms wont be stand-alone humanoid units ranging through fields to pick crops. Any piece of hardware implementing an algorithm which automates some of the manual work of farming falls under this heading. One good example of this is the LettuceBot, a precision thinning technology which works to visually characterize plants in a lettuce row, identify which plants to keep and eliminating unwanted plants to optimize yield. The unit doesnt move by itself but is guided along by a tractor instead. The technology has been developed by Blue River Technology of Sunnyvale, CA, a company which has attracted $13 million in investment between 2011 and 2014 to commercialize this product. The LettuceBots creators hope toprovide the technology as a third-party service to farm owners before manufacturing the unit for commercial sale. Cont'd...

Stony Brook University Helps Prepare Next Generation of Farmers by Introducing a Hydroponic 'Freight Farm' On Campus

Cited as 4th most environmentally responsible university* in 2015, SBU is first higher ed campus to get a Freight Farm.

Trimble Acquires HarvestMark to Provide Food Traceability and Quality Control

Acquisition Enables Trimble to Provide Food Quality Inspection and Food Traceability to Producers, Distribution Centers and Retailers

Precision Farming Expo 2015

This year attendees can expect to see a lot of Ag focused drone systems and also enjoy interfacing with the people making them but that is not all. Our focus this year is on the "Drones, Data, Droids and Dirt."

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HOW DO YOU FEED 10 BILLION PEOPLE?

HOW DO YOU FEED 10 BILLION PEOPLE?

"Smart farming" is an important part of the answer to this existential question: Extremely high efficiency in food production through the targeted use of the latest technology, computer-supported and - where possible - fully automatic. Seeds are individually and precisely placed; fruits carefully picked by mechanical grippers; fertilizers and plant protection products applied in small doses and in a targeted manner. These operations require a large number of small electric motors that are both robust and powerful.