Agricultural robot

An agribot or agricultural robot is a robot deployed for agricultural purposes.

The idea of applying robotics technology in agriculture is very new. The main area of application of robots in agriculture is at the harvesting stage. Fruit picking robot and sheep shearing robot are designed to replace human labour. The agricultural industry is behind other industries in using robots because the sort of jobs involved in agriculture are not straight forward and many repetitive tasks are not exactly the same everytime. In most cases, a lot of factors have to be considered (e.g., the size and colour of the fruit to be picked) before the commencement of a task.

Examples

* "Ag Ant", an inexpensive foot-long bot that works cooperatively [ [http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=177 AgBots: Agricultural Robots Take The Field: Science Fiction in the News ] ] .

* The Oracle Robot [ [http://kernow.curtin.edu.au/www/Agrirobot1/oracle.htm The Oracle Robot ] ]

* The Shear Magic Robot [ [http://kernow.curtin.edu.au/www/Agrirobot1/shmagic.htm The Shear Magic Robot ] ]

* Fruit Picking Robot [ [http://kernow.curtin.edu.au/www/Agrirobot1/frutrob.htm Fruit Picking Robot ] ]

* Harvest Automation is a company founded by former iRobot employees to develop robots for greenhouses [ [http://www.harvestautomation.com/ Harvest Automation, Inc.] ]

Timeline

Developments related to robotics from the NISTEP [ [http://www.nistep.go.jp/ Nistep Homepage ] ] 2030 report :
* 2013-2014 — agricultural robots (AgRobots [ [http://age-web.age.uiuc.edu/faculty/teg/Research/BiosystemsAutomation/AgRobots/AgRobots.asp UIUC Agricultural Engineering | Faculty and Staff ] ] , [ [http://www.service-robots.org/applications/agriculture.htm service-robots.org - agriculture & harvesting ] ] ).
* 2013-2017 — robots that care for the elderly
* 2017 — medical robots performing low-invasive surgery
* 2017-2019 — household robots with full use.
* "???"' — Nanorobots

References

ee also

Future of robotics