Will the future of agriculture really replace farmers with robots?

The next time you stand in line at the cashier at the supermarket, think of the farmers who fill your basket. They are having a hard time these days, and you are sure to spend more on food; for the millions of hungry people around the world, it is even more of a matter of life and death. To make matters worse, some studies have pointed out that the world's demand for food will double by 2050. For farmers, while squeezing more crops from the land, they must also reduce the damage to the environment caused by farming. All this shows that we should rethink the way of farming and raise automation to a whole new level.

In the new model farm, precision will be the key. If the chemicals can be accurately sprayed on the crops they need, why bother to apply them all over the land? In the future, every crop will receive just the right input, neither more nor less, which will not only reduce the use of chemicals, but also achieve a better harvest. But this is easier said than done: large farms in Europe and the United States tend to be thousands of hectares, and automation is the key to precision farming. Specifically, agricultural engineers point out that for precision farming, robots have to act as farmers.

It may not be long before agricultural robots will be able to recognize seedlings and use appropriate amounts of fertilizer and water droplets to promote their growth. Other machines identify weeds and use a small drop of herbicide, a blowtorch, or a high-energy laser to root them out. Not only that, these machines can recognize all kinds of ripe vegetables and harvest them.

Robots can also bring about upheaval in other areas, such as in agricultural work, in the way we farm, in soil and soil quality, and in the amount of energy and carbon invested in farming. They can reduce pollution and water use. But for ordinary people, perhaps the most significant is the change in the appearance of cultivated land. With the participation of robots, crops can be planted in carefully divided small fields, and orchards will be covered with rows of two-dimensional trees. Not only that, robot farmers may even have an impact on the kinds of fruits and vegetables served on the table.

The process of mechanization for more than a century has transformed agriculture in most parts of the world into industrial-scale activities, of which grain farms are the most mechanized. Other crops, such as oranges and tomatoes used to make processed foods, have also been picked by machines. In thousands of dairy farms, cows have also been milked by robots. None of these products have been manipulated manually before entering the shopping mall near your home.

This is not enough, the next generation of automated agricultural machines are already busy in the fields. You may have seen them, but you haven't noticed them, because these robots are disguised as tractors. Today's "tractors", many of which are self-driving, rely on GPS navigation across the fields and can "talk" to their parts. And these parts, such as a plow, a sprayer, etc., can also "answer" to the tractor. "for example, a lawn mower can tell a tractor, 'you're driving too fast' or'to the left,'" says Simon Blackmore, an agricultural technology researcher at Harper Adams University College in the UK. He also said that such systems are becoming standard.

Different agricultural locomotives are also starting to talk to each other. A compound harvester sold by John Deere in 2012 can contact a tractor trailer and remind drivers to load grain. Fendt of Germany has also developed tractors that work in pairs, one of which is operated manually and the other is self-driving, imitating the action of the first one on the side. This system can effectively halve farmers' working time in the fields-and this is just the beginning.

But then again, when fully automated systems come into the fields, they will no longer look like tractors. Today's agricultural machines are large and heavy, so they have a major flaw: they squeeze the soil, reduce pores, and kill beneficial organisms. As a result, the crops will not be able to thrive. Compacted soil will also increase Rain Water erosion. "Why do we have to plow and loosen the soil? The main purpose is to repair the damage caused by large tractors, "Blackmore pointed out." 80% of the energy put into farming is used to repair the damage. This method of farming must be changed. "

He believes that the use of teams of light automatic robots is expected to solve this problem. He also pointed out that replacing brute force with precision is the key. "A seed can grow with only one square centimeter of land, and as long as we put a small amount of energy into that piece of land, the crops can grow well."

With such a light robot, ploughing is no longer necessary, which can greatly reduce energy consumption and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from farming. When the land is no longer tight, the soil can retain its original structure and retain beneficial organisms. They can also absorb more water and maintain longer fertility.

Automatic robots with these capabilities have begun to show their spirit in field experiments. They need to have three key abilities: the ability to drive automatically, to analyze the scene in front of them, and to help farmers burn weeds, spray pesticides or harvest crops.

The navigation system is still the simplest part, especially after the high-precision satellite navigation technology RTK-GPS. The technology, which allows the machine to position itself within two centimeters, was developed by Arno Ruckelshausen of the German University of Applied Sciences to navigate a modular agricultural robot called BoniRob. The BoniRob looks like a four-wheeled SUV and uses several spectral imagers to distinguish between green crops and brown soil. It can write down the location of each crop and return again and again during the growing season to observe their growth (see Agricultural Technology, vol. 67, p. 37).