Robots to Help Farmers 50
Roland Piquepaille writes "Robots designed to help farmers have been built before, but this time, engineers from the University of Warwick have chosen to develop robots that will reduce farm labor costs. In recent months, they've built a robotic mushroom picker, an inflatable conveyor belt and a grass cutting robot that might also be used by golf course owners."
Will this be like Hybrid cars? (Score:1, Interesting)
Nis
Re:Awesome (Score:1, Interesting)
One problem with circular fields is that the area between fields and between fields & lot-lines goes wasted. You can completely tile a plane (e.g. Nebraska) with rectangles, but complete coverage with (finite sized) circles is impossible.
That said, in desert countries (e.g middle east), where irrigation is absolutely required, you do see circular fields, separated by sand. The only stuff that grows is that watered by central pivot irrigation. [air-and-space.com]
Tip of the iceburg (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Awesome (Score:1, Interesting)
This is a bad idea, think about it from a mathematical perspective.
By using a circle (no matter how large), you're alaways going to have parts of the land that will not covered by a sweep out from the center. Imagine a circle inside a box, if the robot always goes around and the maximum distance it goes out is the radius, then the corners of the box will never be tilled/seeded/harvested/etc.
Over large plots of land, this seemingly "small" area can definitely add up.
Also, nobody sells land in circles, or else the aliens doing crop circles would have stopped years ago...
Re:Will this be like Hybrid cars? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, but early threshing machines (Score:3, Interesting)
Not strictly on topic perhaps, but goes to show that there is nothing much new under the sun.
Still, the whole thing reminds me of the Australian attempts to build robot sheep shearers, a brilliant idea if you don't mind cleaning the blood off the wall afterwards. With all the ineducable people in our society with nothing to do but take drugs and steal to pay for them (estimated 280 000 in the UK, how many in the US I dread to think), I would have thought (just as Huxley did in Brave New World) that the real answer is to pay adequately for farm laboring jobs so we have something for the less intelligent in society to do. What we paid for in food we would get back in reduced taxes and insurance premiums.
Re:No, but early threshing machines (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Or you know... you could use cows/goats (Score:3, Interesting)
followed by
Or you know, they could just get a bunch of cows to do the job instead.
Hmm. We used to have a goat that "mowed" our two-acre lawn (on a 42 acre tree farm). I think it gave milk too.
And, it didn't rust.
In fact, it ate cans. So, if my goat met the farming robot, it would probably be thinking "Hmm. Lunch!"
Revenge tastes best when accompanied by chewing sounds.