tional Centre for Precision Farming (NCPF) in Great Britain. And raising efficiency has become exceedingly necessary: according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) worldwide food production will have to increase by 70 percent until 2050 to accommodate the worldwide demand. To meet this, manufacturers have already begun working on a vast array of high-performance machines today.
Professor Heinz Ulbrich and his team at the Institute of Applied Mechanics of the Technische Universität München (TUM) are also making an important contribution: Their machine could soon become the next standard in agricultural robotics. With funding from the European Commission, they are developing a modifiable robotic arm. Depending on the requirements, different modules such as sensors, spraying devices or manipulators can be easily swapped. Their partner institute in Wageningen is also working on a sophisticated sensor system: special cameras that generate a three dimensional picture of the robot’s surroundings, helping it to distinguish fruits from leaves. Besides the proofed and tested manipulator, some other special modules are also planned: a sensor for determining the ripeness of grapes with fluorescent light, for example. Then robots could even pluck and preen in vineyards and orchards.
New Technologies and Traditional Machinery
“Robots will have considerable effects on agriculture”, says David Dorhout. Basic concepts such as crop rows might become unnecessary and not a single square inch will remain unobserved. Blackmore dares a prognosis: “In 20 years robotics will have revolutionized agriculture.” He is also certain that new technologies will be employed alongside traditional machinery. “And later robot generations will be intelligent enough to adapt to nature, the weather and other environmental conditions”, Blackmore adds. Crop Science’s technology expert, Peter Dahmen agrees: “We don’t know what the future looks like. But it is quite conceivable that robots will help us to increase the productivity of farming in a more sustainable and environmentally compatible way.”
New Technologies and Traditional Machinery
Farm of the Future
Professor Blackmore, why do we need robots in agriculture?
In the past and up to today, agriculture has been very energy intensive. On the other side, energy has been very cheap and we have used a lot of it to develop agriculture. But energy is going to become more expensive in the future. And the way we are getting pressures from the environment, from legislation and from society, we need to do everything we can to make food production processes as efficient as possible. So what we are seeing now is the advent of smarter machines that only use a minimum amount of energy, thus saving costs and allowing us to devote more efforts to aspects like food quality. We don’t need to have robotics in agriculture, but we do need to make agriculture more efficient. And one way of doing that is to have smarter machines. Machines that understand the variability we see in the field everyday and are able to adjust to get us the output we need.
What will happen to the agricultural workforce?
Mobile robots will replace the semi-skilled worker. But this is a very different situation from a totally autonomous farm, where no person ever sets foot. There is never going to be a totally automated farm. We will still need farmers, farm managers and agronomists. In short, we will still need people to make decisions. On the other hand, some agricultural tasks are better suited for machines. So we will require an increased quality of the workforce to deal with high-tech machines. This is one of the things happening in Japan at the moment. The government there is investing a lot of money in agricultural robotics to increase the workers’ skill level. This in turn increases the workers’ pay and the quality of life in rural areas.
What are the advantages of agricultural robots?
Aside from increased productivity and lower costs, robots will give us the opportunity to better understand crop growth and crop development than ever be