Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp Ladybird is an autonomous farm robot capable of conducting mobile monitoring of a variety of different crops.

Farming in the 20th century was about bigger paddocks and ever bigger machinery, but a new generation of producers sees merit in keeping it small and smart. Modern robotics promises to transform our agricultural sector and address labour shortages, as Antony Funnell reports.

In the 30 years to 2011 the number of farmers in Australia declined by 40 percent. The reasons were varied—farm rationalisations, drought, economic downturns—but many younger farmers left the land simply because they saw no future in it.

Currently it's about big fields—what works on the big field as an average. Well, we are not worried about averages, we want production on every little bit.

As a result, over that same period, the proportion of farmers aged over 55 increased from 26 per cent to 47 per cent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Young Australians leaving rural areas in favour of the city reflect a global trend toward greater urbanisation, but that's little comfort for those concerned about the future of Australian farming.

James Underwood, a senior research fellow with the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney, says that dramatic demographic shift has caused instability in the rural workforce. And he believes at least part of the solution lies in the lab, and the development of what are called agbots: smallish robotic units that can be deployed on farms to take on the work that was once done by humans.

While the fear of robot-induced unemployment may worry many in cities and suburbs, in the country, at least, the ability of robots to take over more and more farm work may prove a blessing, not a curse.

Underwood sees automated machines increasingly filling the current manpower shortage and says he's hopeful the high-tech nature of modern farming robotics may also provide an incentive for young, tech-savvy Australians to move back to the land.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp Dr James Underwood at the Centre for Field Robotics, Sydney University, with Ladybird, the robot that can identify and spray weeds in vegetable crops

Earlier this year at a commercial vegetable farm in Cowra, the ACFR unveiled one of its latest agbot creations, the Ladybird, a sophisticated autonomous robot powered by solar energy that is capable of undertaking a variety of monitoring and evaluation tasks. It's also an efficient killer: as it slowly wheels its way around a paddock it can locate and eliminate individual weeds by means of a targeted sprayer.

But Ladybird is just one of many robotic platforms under development at the centre, including a variety of drones and a pair of autonomous rovers christened Mantis and Shrimp.

'These vehicles have turned out to be really excellent, particularly for tree crop applications,' says Underwood. 'The robots are equipped with a whole number of different sensors that really span across the electromagnetic spectrum, using lasers to build three-dimensional pictures of the world.

'We've then used these in tree crop applications where the robots can drive themselves up and down the rows of an orchard, and using all of these sensors we can put together a really complete picture of the trees and how they are growing.

'We can automatically detect and count flowers and fruit, and give maps of that information to growers. That information turns out to be really useful for a decision support capability. Growers can look at the information covering their orchard and they can identify trouble spots and work out how to address those problems so that they can get really the maximum output from their acreage.'

Underwood says this is a boom time for agricultural robotics, driven by a significant reduction in component technology prices.

'The cost of the sensors has been coming down while at the same time the accuracy and the capability of those sensors has been increasing dramatically. Similarly with motors and robotic arms and things like that.

'Another one is battery technology. As we know from other areas, battery technology has improved dramatically in the last decade, and that's another real driver for making these systems lower-cost and very effective.'

Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp AgBot is a lightweight, golf buggy-sized robot that has been specifically designed to reduce the environmental impact of weeding.

Not just leaner, but cleaner and greener

There are also major environmental benefits to be had from agbot use through a reduction in herbicide usage.

Because agbots like Mantis, Shrimp and Ladybird adopt a targeted approach to weed destruction, the overall use of agricultural poisons can be significantly reduced—by up to 40 per cent according to research undertaken by the Queensland University of Technology.

Susan McDonnell, a regional representative for Queensland and northern New South Wales for grain industry organisation GrainGrowers, says that reduction represents both an environmental and an economic win for her members.

'From a work, health and safety point of view, we're not having to handle the chemicals ... and if we can cut chemical use for some of our sprays, it will cut costs,' she says.

And with weeds in Australia developing a chemical resistance, a new emphasis on the use of microwave technology for weed control could potentially replace herbicides altogether.

James Underwood agrees that any reduction in the use of chemical agents can only be of benefit to Australian primary producers, and reducing our reliance on insecticides and poisons could help re-brand our produce.

'A lot of the productivity gains go hand in hand with environmental gains as well, and so I think the future of agriculture with robotics is one that is a leaner, greener operation,' he says.

'It's not unreasonable to imagine that in the future with technology like this you might actually be able to have mainstream organic produce that is actually farmed at the kind of scale that the current non-organic crops are farmed at.'

According to agronomist Neville Crooke, the use of small-scale robotics also opens up the possibility of increasing the overall amount of productive land. Crooke, who's involved with a Queensland-based agbot company called SwarmFarm, says a reliance on large-scale machinery has limited the amount of land that can be used for agriculture.

'Currently it's about big fields—what works on the big field as an average. Well, we are not worried about averages, we want production on every little bit. There's a lot of country out there that we currently don't farm. It has been farmed, but big equipment doesn't work in small areas. So the smaller areas, they will now become very productive. There's nothing wrong with the soil, we just need the technology to do it efficiently.'

SwarmFarm has been developing a small robotic weed-killer called Swarmbot. The robot isn't much to look at—it's a fairly simple metal platform on wheels—but like Ladybird, Shrimp and Mantis, its simplicity belies its sophistication.

Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp Andrew Bate, of SwarmFarm at Gindie in Queensland, has developed a weed spraying robot

'It's about lightweight machines that can travel very slowly down to a crawling speed, even stop at individual plants and go and intervene and manipulate those plants,' says farmer and Swarmbot developer Andrew Bate.

'We can actually slow right down on a resistant weed and stop. We can sit there for 15 minutes if we want to, applying a herbicide very accurately onto the leaves. That to me is probably the key part of how this technology is going to roll out into agriculture, that ability to slow down and stop and actually intervene with individual plants.'

And if the process is slow, James Underwood says that time is more than offset by other benefits.

'In some cases the actual speed of the vehicle, of the robot, may be a lot slower than the speed of the full-sized tractors, but then you make up for that in terms of the fact that it can run overnight and also the fact that you can scale up or scale down these systems based on how many of the individual smaller platforms you have.

'There's a real opportunity for productivity gains and also scalability, so that small operators could use a system of two robots, whereas the top-end operators who have massive properties could have a system of 50 robots tending to their farm.'

For Bate, it's about working smarter in an industry that has become too fixated on the need for heavy machinery.

'What we are doing here is developing a robotic farming system,' he says. 'So what we're thinking is, "What is the best way to grow a crop, and how can robots do that for us?"'

'It's a whole new paradigm,' agrees Neville Crook. 'It's like when the tractor replaced the horse. Well, this is the next big step from there, it just tips everything upside down. It's about changing the face of agriculture.'

Robot agriculture Listen to this episode of Future Tense.

Exploring new ideas, new approaches, new technologies—the edge of change. Future Tense analyses the social, cultural and economic fault lines arising from rapid transformation.



