AgBots: Robots On the Farm

In a cornfield in central Illinois , agrarian engineers are prepare robots to do the unremarkable husbandry jobs like weeding , take care out for harmful insects , and taking soil samples . bid “ ag robots , ” the idea is to replace bulky farm equipment with swarms of preciseness helpers that can exert an total field autonomously . The one pictured , developed by University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign engineer Tony Grift [ left ] and visiting scholar Yoshi Nagasaka [ right ] , apply laser to cover the edible corn rows , while other , gaudy designs habituate more haphazard approach to randomly cover the same ground .

And that ’s about where they ’re at for now — just attempt to figure out how to get around . Once they figure out how to keep their metal children in the corn , the next whole step will be to teach them how to take care of the plants themselves , perhaps by preciseness - spitting tiny amounts of pesticide at target gage .

After that ? An entire test farm maintained by robots . And after that ? The first moo-cow tipped only by automaton .