Carnegie Mellon is at it again. This time they want to make robots do all the farm work.

Tony Stentz, an engineer from Carnegie Mellon thinks the time is right for such pursuits. Tony worked on Boss, the autonomous vehicle that won DARPA’s Grand Challenge.

Tony and other colleagues have outfitted the tractor pictured here and are able to make it navigate on its own through an orchard by using a 3D laser ranging scanner.

The outfitted vehicles could either be used to spray crops or potentially pick fruit.

A company called Vision Robotics already has robots that do pruning. This is a slightly different approach to robotic farming in that a human drives the tractor and robotic arms do the pruning.

Link via (New Scientist)