By Brian Halweil
Earlier this summer, I took a dive into the world of small farm machines that will soon be crawling farm fields near you. In the sort of thoughtful, enthusiastic reaction that makes any storyteller smile, I was inundated with tips from robot builders, imaginers, investors and watchers from around the world.
Most important, I now know that the global farm robot space is bigger, more intelligent and closer-to-commercialization that I realized. We are perhaps a few short years from a day when you will drive past a farm or walk past a community garden and see a robot working the ground.
These visions are not unprecedented. As I learned from the robot geeks who came out of the woodwork, one of C3P0’s first lines in StarWars is an uptight comment about irrigation when he first meets the young moisture farmer Skywalker. Gaze into the background of the shop where Skywalker tries to hack into R2D2’s memory and you’ll see other bots used by farmers on Tatoine, some of which look not unlike Rowbot and Agribotix powered drones and HelloTractors. In Asimov’s 1985 novel “Robots and Empire,” which takes place several millenia in the future, every planet in the galaxy, including the ailing Earth, grows its food entirely with the help of robots: many planets are stewarded by agricultural robots for the benefits of humans elsewhere.
I’ll admit occasional visions of a dystopic digital dirtscape. But I’m happy to report that the robots already working on farms around the world, so far, are delivering a different narrative. These bots, like the loyal R2D2 and BB8, are more concerned with assisting their human masters, than disrupting them.
In the middle of this back and forth volley with commenters in the robots space that I stumbled upon the above picture. It was a turning point since this image defines for me the great promise of farm robots. A young happy a bearded 30-something farmer in a trucker hat wheeling a barrow between rows of carrot tops. And behind him, working in symbiosis, rolls a robot.Developed by Naio Technologies, a France-based robot builder, Oz, is a farmer’s helper, if it’s anything. It’s just that sort of farm that Naio is targeting, remarkably. That’s the transformative power of bots. Not to replace but to aid.
Models like their Oz, Cozy, Dino, Straddle, and Little Oz could weed veggies, move 100 pound weights (bags of compost, for instance), and collect all sorts of data on the state of the farm. Even better, they could do it continuously, day or night. There are models that plant seeds while they mulch. And there are primitive soft fruit harvesters that are not yet widely commercialized.
But it’s not hard to imagine that some major features breakthrough or price drop or increasing cost of employing human farmers, that farm robots might be seen wheeling into town to buy some odds and ends that the farmer (or farmwife) needs.
Watch Oz take care of a greenhouse, all by itself. Not really, but almost.
Oz is known as a hoeing robot. It drags a metal implement or rotor through the soil, targeting weeds, and also turning the soil.
Oz uses laser-based guidance technology to determine the best weeding depth, and can maneuver between fields with different crops, without inadvertently mowing over the plants. The developers are proud to say that Naio’s spirit animal of sorts is “a Hawaiian plant, having the ability to adapt to its environment.”
