% Agriculture (ag) Electric-drones are now a valuable resource for the ag-industry (farmers). e-drones can go where expensive heavy ag equipment can't w/o damaging crops and or soil. e-drones also allow an aging farmer work force control several robots remotely, even program an AI to do routine on a set flight-pattern, or special tasks with specific instructions. Ag-player John Deere is getting involved gobbling/buying up AI and other auton companies that can be useful to the ag-equipment JD sells. %
[dated] https://www.cnet.com/news/this-farm-has-no-farmers/ This farm has no farmers October 3, 2017 Claire Downs [videos dated https://youtu.be/VRDpgrZp3TU Time-lapse of harvest Sep 7, 2017 - Uploaded by Hands Free Hectare HFH Watch the whole six hour harvest in only under a minute and a half! https://youtu.be/NY4x5pLOYP4 #34 'Ands It Off' Farmers weekley Harvest Live Sep 5, 2017 - Uploaded by Hands Free Hectare HFH Autonomus combine from the Hands Free Hectare Team cutting the first strip to test the systems capabilities ... ] The 'Hands Free Hectare' gives us a peek at the future of automated agriculture. Just after sunset on Sept. 6, 2017, celebrations erupted on a farm in the quiet county of Shropshire, England. After a year of hard labor and careful planning, researchers achieved the previously impossible: the world's first fully automated harvest -- from barren land to flourishing crops -- had been successfully completed. The "Hands Free Hectare" [ http://www.handsfreehectare.com/ ] used nothing but robots, and was yet another step forward in revolutionizing how we feed the world. After receiving £200,000 in government funding in October 2016, the team from Harper Adams University set to work modifying a tractor and 25-year-old combine with cameras, lasers and GPS systems. [Electric] Drones aided in monitoring the field, while a robot "scout" scooped up soil samples for inspection. Previous studies on driverless tractors have used large machines to get the job done. But the Harper Adams team used another tactic: Their small tractor and combine were able to make more precise movements, limit damage to soil for future harvests and increase efficiency. The harvest yielded 4.9 tons of barley, which Kit Franklin, the project's leader, told The Times is "the most expensive hectare of barley ever." The plan, of course, is to eventually bring the price of autonomous farming down via economies of scale. The Hands Free Hectare farm joins a host of other companies and organizations pushing farming further toward automation. Last month, tractor manufacturer John Deere purchased [ https://qz.com/1071303/john-deere-spent-300-million-on-blue-river-technology-a-company-that-murders-weeds-with-artificial-intelligence/ ] the AI company Blue River Technology with the goal of using machine vision tools to automate weed-killing. Wall-Ye [ http://wall-ye.com/ ], a French grape-picking robot, has enchanted Burgundy's wine region for years. Kyoto-based robo lettuce farm Spread [ http://spread.co.jp/en/ ] hopes to produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day and decrease energy costs by one third. Meanwhile, drones are changing the way that farmers monitor their crops all around the world. Robots are also the key to aiding a dwindling and aging farming workforce. As labor shortages [ http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farm-mechanization/ ] in states like California raise concerns about the future of farming, agriculture is starting to lean more on robots. "It's not about putting people out of jobs; instead changing the job they do," Franklin said in a statement [ http://www.handsfreehectare.com/press-releases ]. "The tractor driver won't be physically in the tractor driving up and down a field. Instead, they will be a fleet manager and agricultural analyst, looking after a number of farming robots and meticulously monitoring the development of their crops." Automation isn't all about replacing jobs that humans do; often it's about doing jobs that humans can't do. For many ag-tech companies, that means data collection [ https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9amb45/the-most-useful-tool-on-the-modern-farm-is-data ] and deep learning. The startup Descartes Labs [ https://www.descarteslabs.com/ ], for instance, uses satellite imaging data to predict crop yields, a task that could be a valuable resource for governments wanting to predict food shortages or the impacts of climate change. The Hands Free Hectare farmers, meanwhile, plan to use their newly reaped barley to crack open a couple cold ones: The farm hopes to brew some delicious beer with their robotically harvested key ingredient. [© CBS Interactive] https://www.livescience.com/60567-robotically-tended-farm-completes-first-harvest.html Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest Sep 29, 2017 [image https://img.purch.com/w/660/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5saXZlc2NpZW5jZS5jb20vaW1hZ2VzL2kvMDAwLzA5NS83OTMvb3JpZ2luYWwvaGFuZHMtZnJlZS1oZWN0YXJlLmpwZWc= Partner Series Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest Hands Free Hectare is an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the United Kingdom. / Harper Adams University ] It's harvest season in many parts of the world, but on one farm in the United Kingdom, robots — not humans — are doing all the heavy lifting. At Hands Free Hectare, an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the village of Edgmond in the U.K., about 5 tons (4.5 metric tons) of spring barley have been harvested from the world’s first robotically tended farm. Everything from start to finish — including sowing, fertilizing, collecting samples and harvesting — has been done by autonomous vehicles on the farm, according to the researchers. The team behind the project thinks that robotic technology could improve yields in agriculture, which is necessary if the world's growing population is to be fed in coming years. (Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures) The researchers tackled this problem by using commercially available agriculture machines and open-source software that is used to guide hobbyists’ drones. "In agriculture, nobody has really managed to solve the problem of autonomy," said Jonathan Gill, mechatronics researcher at Harper Adams University, who led the project."We were like, Why is this not possible? If it's possible in drone autopilots that are relatively cheap, how come there are companies out there that are charging exorbitant amounts of money to actually have a system that just follows a straight line?" The researchers purchased several small-size agricultural machines, including a tractor and a combine, a machine for harvesting grain crops. They then fitted the machines with actuators, electronics and robotic technology that would allow them to control the machines without the presence of a human operator. "The first stage was to make it radio controlled," Gill said. "This was our first step towards autonomy. From that point, we moved on to preprogram all the actions that need to be performed into the autopilot system." Gill's collaborator, Martin Abell, who works for Precision Decisions, an industrial agricultural company that partners with the university, explained that the system follows a certain trajectory with preprogrammed stops to perform certain actions. "The vehicles navigate entirely based on the GPS, and they are just essentially driving towards targets that we predetermined," Abell said. "At different GPS targets, there are different actions designed to be carried out." Abell said the researchers struggled to make the machines follow a straight line, which initially resulted in quite a lot of crop damage. However, the scientists think they will be able to fix the problem in the coming years and will eventually achieve better yields than a conventionally maintained farm of the same size could produce. To monitor the field and take samples of the plants, the researchers developed special grippers attached to drones. As the drone flies above the field, the grippers can cut off some samples and deliver them to the researchers. The scientists said that the robotic technology could enable future farmers to more precisely distribute fertilizers and herbicides, but could also lead to improvements in soil quality. Currently, to achieve all the required tasks in a reasonable amount of time, farmers rely on very large and heavy machines. In the future, they could use flocks of smaller robotic tractors and harvesters, the researchers said. The farmer would, for example, be able to apply fertilizer only to the plants that are doing poorly and wouldn’t waste it on those that don't need it, the researchers explained. "At the moment, the machines used in agriculture are large, they operate quickly, they cover large areas of ground quickly, but with it comes inaccuracy," Abell said. "Small machines working with smaller working widths would provide a means to bring the resolution down. Instead of a 100-foot (30 meters) sprayer, you would have a 20-foot (6 m) sprayer, and that’s just the beginning of making things smaller." The Harper Adams team plans to use the robotically harvested spring barley to make a limited batch of "hands-free" beer that will be distributed to the project’s partners as a token of thanks. In the coming years, they want to focus on improving the precision of the procedures and quantify the effects of the robotic technology on the yields. 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