Antony Funnell: Hello and welcome to another edition of Future Tense, I'm Antony Funnell.

Today on the program we continue our look at developments in robotics, focusing this time on robots and agriculture.

And toward the end of the program we'll meet an Austrian roboticist named Thomas Shmickle who's doing things with 'thermobots' and things that swarm.

Thomas Schmickl: So our project name is ASSISI BF, whereby B stands for bees and F for fish, and the two parts of the project are both dealing with integrating robots, devices, with animals. In one case we want to associate robots with honeybees, and in the other half of the project we associate robots with fish. And the aim, the purpose is for generating a society which is bio-hybrid, so being a democratic, self-organised, integrated society which is mixed between machines and animals.

Antony Funnell: Thomas Schmickl from the University of Graz, later in the show.

But let's look first at life on the farm and advances in agricultural robotics.

We'll head shortly to a property in central Queensland, but before we do, I'm going to ask James Underwood to set the scene. Dr Underwood is a senior research fellow at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney and he says it's an exciting time of change.

James Underwood: I think we are at the start of a real boom time for agricultural robotics. The actual ideas behind it, like automatic sensing of crops and automatic interaction with the crops has really been around for a very long time, even as early as the 1850s. There are technical drawings from that time showing concepts of automated crop handling systems. But it has really taken all the technology in sensing, in computers, in actuators to develop over the last 150 year or so to get the point where we can now actually start to make those technical drawings a reality. And we are at that time right now I would say.

Antony Funnell: And is size and agility an issue here? Is the very fact that robotics can be quite small, has that changed the situation?

James Underwood: Absolutely. The way the technology has gone in tractors over the last couple of decades, they've been getting bigger and bigger and heavier and heavier, and that has been a driver of increased productivity because the one operator driving that can then tend to a much larger field, and we have fields spanning tens and tens of kilometres which can be tended to by these large tractors. But then there are downsides with that, such as the soil compaction that's caused by these very large machines, which is not good for the crop and for the soil health. And so we have an opportunity to replace the capability that such a large tractor can give you, we can replace that with a small team of many smaller robots that can work together in a very smart way to achieve the same thing and in a much more economical and a way that is better for the crop as well.

Antony Funnell: You mention economical there. The price of robotics has come down quite significantly in the last 10 years, hasn't it.

James Underwood: Yes, it has, and that has really been driven by all the component technology prices coming down. So 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, there has been a lot of cost reduction in those areas. And the cost in computing also has been coming down while the performance goes up exponentially. And then another one is battery technology. As we know from other areas, the battery technology has improved dramatically in the last decade, and that's another real driver for making these systems lower cost and very effective.

Andrew Bate: It hasn't been something that has just come to me overnight. I spend a lot of time out in the paddock driving machinery, and I guess just general farming, and probably about seven years ago I think I started thinking a lot harder about what we were doing and where we were heading.

Antony Funnell: Andrew Bate is a farmer who understands exactly what James Underwood is talking about. Andrew owns a farm out near Emerald in central Queensland. And his desire to do things in a smarter way has seen him set up a new business called SwarmFarm to produce his own agricultural robots

Engineer talking to Andrew: Okay, so this is just on remote control back to the shed, and there are obstacles that have actually been detected. And what we've got is the yellow parts there are the actual…

Antony Funnell: SwarmFarm got its initial support from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics and the farm robotics unit at the Queensland University of Technology and it now employees its own engineers.

Andrew Bate: You know, we'd been doing the controlled traffic and the zero till things since the late '90s or mid-'90s really. We had gone and doubled the size of our machinery. And then we got this big productivity drive, we had to get bigger, so get more efficient, there was this big drive, so we went to a 24-metre planter and 24-metre spray rigs. And things just started getting bigger and bigger and heavier, and that was probably the big catalyst for me, a lot of that time out in the field watching what we were doing. The bigger we went, the more we compromised what we were doing in the paddock. We had gone from doing things with a pair of tweezers, doing a nice accurate job, to these big machines we were doing with a pair of fencing pliers.

That was probably the first catalyst for me, you know, looking at what we were doing, thinking we are compromising more and more stuff here the bigger we get, and the trend is only going one way; bigger and bigger machinery. And why go bigger machinery? It's a laboursaving device, everyone is trying to save labour. One operator can get more acres done in a day, there's this ego driven thing—who's got the highest horsepower tractor or the biggest planter in the country, or who can spray the most acres in a day.

And why are we doing this? Labour saving. What benefit do we get out of it, does it grow better crops? I mean, yes, one of the drives is to get the job done on time, we all know that the best farmers get the job done on time, but the wider you make something, the more compromises there is; you've got more flex points, you've got more complexity in the systems on board to control that machine, the machine becomes heavier and heavier. It becomes less reliable as you get more and more electronics on board and things like that. So really the idea of the robotics was to simplify things; smaller machines that were simpler, less moving parts, less electronic systems on board. And instead of thinking how can we get the most acres done in a day, what's the best way to grow a crop and how can we use robots to do that?

Antony Funnell: And the answer that Andrew Bate and his colleagues came up with was to build a small, manoeuvrable weed sprayer, which they've christened Swarmbot.

Now, to be honest, Swarmbot isn't an overly impressive looking thing. It's a rather tiny non-descript platform on wheels that makes its way across the field detecting and killing weeds. And that's okay, because it's designed for purpose not prestige.

And what it offers, according to Andrew Bate, is agility and precision.

Andrew Bate: At the moment we're using these large machines, we've got the sledgehammer, we're trying to belt something into a hole. With small machines we can get in, we're very much more adaptable. If there is a small pocket of sandy soil in the corner of a paddock, it's just pretty difficult to go and set a large machine up there to go and do something with that area of the paddock. We can collect the data, we can process the data, but can we go and actually go out and make an intervention in that field practically. And that's where robotics are great. You can program them to go there, they can efficiently get in little areas and turn around and turn efficiently and operate in that area and go and start doing things that we keep ruling out as being too difficult.

We're not trying to automate agriculture here, we're not trying to build driverless tractors. What we are doing here is developing a robotic farming system. So what we're thinking is what is the best way to grow a crop, and how can robots do that for us? And 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. So a good example of that right now is things like resistant weeds where 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 to it very accurately onto the leaves and things like that. 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.

Neville Crook: It's a whole new paradigm. 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 a paradigm. It's not an ag-bot, it's not a robotic, it's not Andrew Bate, it's about changing agriculture, the face of agriculture, internationally as well.

Antony Funnell: Local agronomist Neville Crook is also involved in SwarmFarm. He says it's about going back to much more careful approach to farming rather than simply always focusing on scale.

Neville Crook: We've got to produce more food. We've got to make more productive country out of what we've got, and we can't do that with the technology that we've been using. We're not knocking down any more trees, we've got to do better with what we've got. We've got to make every plant to count, not just say, oh well, roughly that hectare works. That's not good enough anymore, it's about plants. And in the short term it will be about hectares. 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. And there's a lot of country out there that we currently don't farm. It has been farmed, but big equipment don'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.

Antony Funnell: Agronomist Neville Crook.

Now, recent university research suggests the use of agrobots to target individual weeds, rather than spraying an entire paddock, can reduce herbicide use by 40%. And keeping the costs of production down, as James Underwood mentioned earlier, is proving to be a major driving force behind the uptake of agricultural robotics. So it's no surprise then that field tests using robots like Swarmbot have certainly caught the attention of peak industry bodies.

Susan McDonnell is GrainGrowers' regional representative for Queensland and northern New South Wales.

Susan McDonnell: Andrew actually presented at Innovation Generation last year, which is for farming and industry people between the age of 18 and 35. And in the beginning when he started to talk about how the driver has always been to go bigger and faster and he said I actually think we need to go smaller and slower, and initially there was apprehension, but by the time he'd finished his presentation his was the big buzz topic because it got everybody thinking about the possibilities. I think the possibilities are endless.

I think that from the grains industry point of view there are huge advantages with this kind of technology, because it opens up a lot of opportunities for us to be able to use things like microwave technology, which is one of the key factors that could address chemical resistance with weeds. Chemical resistance is a major problem for us in Australia. We are second in the world for this issue. We could use microwave technology on these bots which would then address the amount of chemical we'd be using. If we can cut out chemical use for some of our sprays, it will cut costs. From a work health and safety point of view, we're not having to handle the chemicals. From an environment point to view. And then you get the weed resistance, because at the moment weed resistance to chemical is a major issue. If we can get microwave technology in the paddock by using this, because this gives us the vehicle, this gives us the platform to be able to introduce microwave technology, then we can definitely see a difference with chemical use in Australia.

Andrew Bate: In the future I think that robotics are really going to take over field crop production or plant production. All these new tools and things are going to roll through all sorts of industries doing all sorts of things we haven't even thought of yet as this technology unfolds. So I think robots really are going to be commonplace on farms very, very shortly.

Antony Funnell: Farmer and inventor Andrew Bate and before him Susan McDonnell from GrainGrowers. Now let's go back to James Underwood from Sydney University and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics.

James Underwood: 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.

Antony Funnell: Dr Underwood and his team have also developed their own targeted weed sprayer called Ladybird. We've posted a video link on our website if you want to take a look. Ladybird had its first farm tests on a commercial vegetable orchard in Cowra in NSW earlier this year. But Ladybird isn't the centre's only recent agrobot creation.

James Underwood: So these systems, it's actually a pair of two rovers, one called Mantis and one called Shrimp. And they were actually designed as general purpose robotics and perception research tools that allow us to study a whole number of different applications in different areas, not just agriculture in fact but also mining and defence and logistics applications too. But these vehicles have turned out to be really excellent for particularly tree crop applications. So we called them Mantis Shrimp because that particular animal has a really amazing sensory perception capability, and indeed that's one of the key features of this system. So the robots are equipped with a whole number of different sensors that really span across the electromagnetic spectrum, from the visible light that we humans see through to thermal and also using lasers to build three-dimensional pictures of the world around the robots.

And so 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. And that information turns out to be really useful for a decision support capability. So growers can look at the information covering their orchard and they could identify trouble spots and work out how to deal with those problems and address those problems so that they can get really the maximum kind of output from their acreage.

Antony Funnell: So essentially this is all really about trying to increase yields, isn't it, it's really about space, trying to maximise farming space really.

James Underwood: That's definitely one of the key areas of impact that we see this technology as having, and of course, as you mentioned earlier, there are others such as reducing what we call the input cost in terms of the amount of herbicide that you have to use or the amount of chemical agents that you have to spray on the farm. So 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.

Antony Funnell: We are talking about increasingly sophisticated robotics. What does that do for the skills needed for farming? How user-friendly are these robotics?

James Underwood: That's definitely a key issue with the technology at the moment. As the complexity and the sophistication increases, so does the difficulty of operating that equipment. It remains a significant challenge to package up all this technology such that it can just work every day at the push of a button. And that's one of the fundamental areas of research in robotics that is going on at the University of Sydney and elsewhere around the country and around the world, is how to make that technology reliable enough to be operable by a layperson, if you like. But there are other models as well for how this technology can find its way onto farms. So, for example, I could create a start-up company and I could employ a bunch of technical engineers and robotics experts who could use that technology on the farm on behalf of growers and essentially provide them with the data that they need in much the same way that agronomists operate with precision agriculture technology today. So it's not necessarily the case that these systems have to be sold to farmers, and in a lot of cases a system might be too expensive for just one operator or one grower to use, and so it may be more of a data service type of model that could be used.

Antony Funnell: When we talk about robotics these days, it's almost impossible to talk about robotics without talking about drones. And drones are in fact playing a significant role, aren't they, in the changing face of agriculture. Tell us about the type of drones that you are developing and what their uses are?

James Underwood: We have a number of different kind of drone technologies at the University of Sydney, and indeed this is becoming quite a mature area almost in terms of…you know, there are now a lot of companies that are offering drone-based services to growers. The state-of-the-art I guess with a lot of the commercially available systems is to launch the drone and have it fly around your property, essentially autonomously, and then to look down at the property with various different types of cameras and kind of produce a map that relates to the crop health of your farm. And again, that information can be used to make decisions about how to best manage the variability across your farm. So that's available off-the-shelf or as a service provider model today.

But looking into the future, we're looking at making these systems basically more and more intelligent. So, for example, rather than just maybe flying the systems in a fixed pattern to get that data, we may online actually process the data in real-time and work out where the vehicle should fly to maybe take a second look at some areas where you need more information. And then also starting to actually put some of the not just sensing but actual crop manipulation type tasks onto these flight platforms. So a good example comes from Japan where they are using unmanned helicopters to do things like crop dusting and that kind of thing, removing pilots from what is a very dangerous job in fact. So the future of that technology will be increasing the intelligence in those systems.

So an example from work we've done at the ACFR is to have a helicopter that can fly around and spray herbicide, but we, again, use the cameras to automatically identify in real time where the actual weeds are on the property. So again, you move from this blanket spraying approach to a very targeted system that reduces the amount of herbicide you need and makes it all very easy to use.

Antony Funnell: And given that robots don't need to sleep, I would imagine there are potentially significant productivity gains for farming from robotics.

James Underwood: Yes, that's exactly right. Robots can work 24/7, and we are definitely looking at sensor systems that are as capable or even sometimes more capable during the night as well as operating in the day. So really most of the tasks that we are talking about and predicting for the future can be done both during the day and night and the systems can just keep running, they don't need to sleep, as you say. So that really does give a good benefit for productivity.

I did mention that we are sort of thinking about smaller robots and teams of smaller robots. So 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. So there's a real opportunity for productivity gains and also scalability, so that small operators could use maybe 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. And so it's a very scalable technology as well.

Antony Funnell: There are always employment issues or unemployment issues to be talked about whenever we talk about automation or robotics. But the agricultural sector is slightly different from other industries because there has long been a manpower shortage on farms, in countries like Australia and the United States. So is this one way of addressing that manpower problem?

James Underwood: I think it absolutely is, in a number of ways. Certainly there is a big manpower problem for the agricultural sector in Australia, and similarly in other countries. If you look at the statistics from the ABS from I think it's 2011, you see that actually the median age of farmers in Australia is 53, which is getting up there. And about a quarter of farmers are actually over 65 years old. And the proportion of younger people, younger Australians coming in to work in this sector is really quite low. So you've got this instability in the workforce. And today you do need quite a lot of people to run conventional farming operations. So we think that this kind of technology is going to be able to also provide a kind of stability in the whole agricultural sector.

And another interesting thing is that actually changing the nature of the farm work roles to one that involves more technology may actually attract younger Australians back into that agricultural sector as the nature of the jobs will actually change.

Antony Funnell: Dr James Underwood from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney, thank you very much.

James Underwood: Thanks a lot.

Antony Funnell: To robots now of a very different kind and to the University of Graz in Austria and Associate Professor Thomas Schmickl from the University's Artificial Life Lab.

Professor Schmickl has been working on the development of tiny robots that he hopes will one day live with bees and be able to commune with them.

Thomas Schmickl: So putting the robots into the beehive, that's a long-term perspective. So currently we are not doing that. We are taking the bees out of the beehive, bring them to the lab and let the bees run together with robots in specific arenas where we can study them, where we can film them. That's the future perspective, to be able to put the robots directly into the beehive. Before we can do that we have to learn, we have to find out how do bees react to the robots, how can the robots affect what the bees do. And what we are most interested in; how can the robots and the bees merge together into one society where, let's say, both of them have their say in decision-making, where they self-coordinate, where they self-organise with each other. So that's what we are currently doing.

Antony Funnell: And what sort of decision making do you anticipate that these bees and these robots might one day make?

Thomas Schmickl: So we are focusing on bees that live mostly in the so-called group nest area of the hive. We are working with very young honeybees, we call them the baby bees. Those are bees that emerged within the last 24 hours from their brood cells, and they usually self-locate in the brood nest area. The brood nest area is where they come from, where all the larvae and all the pupae are grown by the bees. This area has a specific temperature profile, because for the bees to be able to produce that vast amount of brood within a day, they have to heat up this brood nest area. Everything works faster in biology when the temperature is higher. And so the bees actively heat up this area to 36 to 38 degrees Celsius to make every growth process faster.

So they self-locate there, these young bees, after they emerge from their brood cells, and they are doing some jobs there, for example cleaning the cells, preparing them for the next generation of brood to be put into those cells. And what we found out is that they take specific care of the temperature that is around them. So our hypothesis is that the temperature somehow tells them where they should be. They tend to be in warmer areas which they have not heated up themselves, it's the older bees that do that, but they seem to specifically care about that surrounding temperature and try to stay in the warmer areas where there is more brood and more work for them to do.

And the theory is that by controlling these bees and by controlling the temperature profiles, we can control the brood production of the bees for example, where and how much brood is effectively generated on specific days.

Antony Funnell: And so you would affect that control by having this very sophisticated robotic bee which mingles with these real bees and can not just learn from these bees but also influence their behaviour.

Thomas Schmickl: We studied these young bees, and these young bees, they cannot fly, they are too young for that, they cannot heat themselves but they care for the temperature. They can for example not sting, which is also something nice if you make experiments with them. And our robots take over more less the roles of the older bees in our arena. So they can produce heat, for example, and in this way they can guide the younger bees.

Antony Funnell: Now, Professor Schmickl's research is just in its early stages, as he pointed out, but the idea of developing a robot bee that can eventually live in a hive and exert influence over real bees isn't some sort of weird insect mind-control, it has a good intent. Bees, as you may know, are crucial to pollination, but they're extremely sensitive to environmental change, so the idea is that the robot bee might be able to help the real bees in dealing with it.

Thomas Schmickl again:

Thomas Schmickl: First of all we would like to monitor, for example, the number of bees in specific areas and we would like to use those robots for entering the bee population without opening the hive. You know, the hive is quite complex, you have many combs in there, it has to be dark, maybe you can install some miniature cameras, but then you need many of them and they only see a subset of the area, so our idea is first we what to read information via those robots.

And then the second step is we would like to, let's say, put a little bit of control over the bees, for example telling them when is a good time for producing more brood and when is a good time for producing less brood. This can come, this information can be based for example on a weather forecast or on some other specific goals that the beekeeper has for his bees.

Our aim is to make the bee colony strong. So at the end, towards winter, to have maximised the number of bees to ensure survival throughout the winter for the next year, and maybe also to let…if the bees grow to high populations they tend to split their colony into two, so this is reproduction of whole bee colonies, and it needs high numbers, and so if we manage to boost the number of bees in the hive by such a technique, this can also help to have more bee colonies over time. So it's not so much about honey production, it's about having large colonies.

Antony Funnell: Associate Professor Thomas Schmickl from the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz in Austria. And he and his colleagues are also looking at building and testing robot fish. Who says science is boring!

Next week on Future Tense, how safe is our cyber world?

Unknown: Just building an application that does what it's meant to is difficult enough. Building it in a way that it's not doing all the things that it shouldn't do as well as doing the things that it should do is even harder.

Unknown: In the entire time that I've been breaking the networks as a job, I've seen three networks out of thousands where I was actually stopped in the process of either breaking in or stealing data. You can find an issue in five minutes, you can find an issue in days or months. It really does depend, from what I've seen, on the amount of time that someone wants to actually spend on a target. You can have a very, very mature security posture, you can do all the best practices, and you can still get owned because there's always another avenue of attack. There's always going to be a point of least resistance. If you keep butting your head against a wall, eventually the wall is going to break. So that's the other way that I look at it.

Antony Funnell: That's online security and safety, next on Future Tense.

Thanks to my co-producer Karin Zsivanovits and sound engineer Steve Fieldhouse.

A special thanks also to our colleagues at ABC TV's Landline program for their assistance with today's story on agrobots: Pip Courtney, Craig Berkman and Paul Castellero.

I'm Antony Funnell, until next time, cheers!