RiceBot Farms Fields While You Sip Sake
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Monday, 5 of January , 2009 at 3:55 am
A rice planting robot developed by the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization in Japan is the grand prize winner of the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry 2008 Robot Awards. There were some other hardware awards, but the only other really interesting winner was (I’m pretty sure) this little guy. Anyway, the ricebot is the first one in the world to be completely automated, using GPS and gyros to figure out its position in the field and keep the rice planted in nice, tidy lines.
Production is probably 10 years away, because of cost and “safety performance,” whatever that refers to… 10 years seems like a long time to me, especially based on the level of automation that many other areas of farming currently enjoy. Basically, everything is largely automatic (if all goes well) besides the actual driving of the machines, which is still left up to humans. But the nice thing about farms is that they’re generally laid out in reliably geometric shapes on flat ground with confined boundaries and very little in the way of unknown obstacles or variables. Extremely robot friendly territory. And, it has the potential to save a lot of hours of boring labor where the problem solving skills of humans are being wasted. Not that I wouldn’t mind trying my hand at driving a combine sometime… Those things look like fun.
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Category: Industrial
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