The fast-paced world is moving ahead with evolving basic humanitarian needs. Sometimes we don’t even realize that we are surrounded by technologies even in our closed knitted envelops. Various industries and businesses have adapted to the tech-world shifting to the plethora of digital transformation.
But little do we think that agriculture is the most basic entity of industries, is also going through a lot of reforms with the rising of technologies.
Due to a shortage of labor and accelerating need to feed the large population around the globe, Agriculture Robots have jumped into the picture. They are becoming a common yet useful assistant of farmers in various works.
As the tech industry is still in the dawn of agri-robo revolution, most of its models are still in trial and research and development zone.
Other than that the technologies that are currently deployed in the agriculture industry are as follows:
Drones for Aerial Imaging
• These are among the first robotic applications adopted by farmers to save time and labor involved in going out for visual checking on a crop.
• Such drones are well-equipped with various features including – (a) multi-spectral and photo cameras for monitoring crop stress, plant growth and predict yields, (b)more advanced drones that are able to carry and deliver props like herbicides, fertilizer, and water.
• This technology can be utilized through a drone-as-a-service type operation.
• The drone has a feature of scheduled flyovers or can be stored on site and used when needed
• The drone is stored at weatherproof docking stations.
• These stations allow the drones to recharge and send data back for analysis.
Robots for Spraying/Weeding
• Making the use of images collected by drones of weed, companies train the robots to identify and pluck weeds.
• These robots are also trained to apply pesticides directly on the weed.
• Robotics technology employed for this duty will prove to be a huge boost for both the farmers and the environment.
GPS System for Auto Steering/Navigation
• With the effectiveness of the GPS system, the farmer can enable their tractors to automatically run on the field and perform agricultural activities required.
• Most of these autonomous devices and function come with a high degree of accuracy.
• Some are even designed to automatically adjust in hilly terrain region.
• The technology enables farmers to follow their tractors exact location and progress via smartphones.
• The machine learning technology that is needed to be encompassed with this activity for avoiding unusual situations, is yet not introduced completely and as a result, these run under the monitoring of operations.
Robotics for Fruit Harvesting
• Crops like strawberries, cucumbers and orchard fruit like apples have early focus on robotics for harvesting purpose.
• This innovation employs image processing and robotic arms to determine what to pick from the field.
• Quality control and grading of the fruits can also be done using these robotic operations.
• Also, by the virtue of data analytics based on crops, it becomes easy to identify business revenue and organize packaging and processing operations.
