Robotics

Robot Bees? Check Out This New Pollination Innovation

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 19:25:56 GMT

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed advanced robotic insects that could aid farming through artificial pollination. They could prove especially useful in the controlled indoor environments of high-tech ‘vertical farms’.

“These type of robots will open up a very new type of use case,” co-lead author Suhan Kim, from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), told Reuters.

“For instance, we can think of artificial pollination. So since our robot looks like an insect, and it’s real lightweight and small, if you can really precisely control the robot we might be able to do something on top of flowers or leaves, which really requires very delicate interactions.”

The robots, each lighter than a paperclip, can hover for approximately 1,000 seconds, over 100 times longer than previous models. They are also capable of performing high-speed acrobatic maneuvers, including double aerial flips.

The new design halves the size of the team’s earlier model, with increased stability while also freeing up space for electronics.

“We want the robot to be able to have a [circuit] board, battery and the sensors on board. So to do that, we need much higher payload than now. So what we’re currently pushing very hard right now is to optimize the robot design to be able to lift more and more so that we can afford these potential payloads,” said Kim.

Long term, the team hope this will enable autonomous flight outside the lab. This technology could significantly boost crop yields in multi-level warehouses by providing a more efficient method for artificial pollination.

Vertical farming, the name given to the production of crops in a series of stacked levels, often in a controlled environment, is a fast-growing industry with billions of dollars being pumped into projects across the globe.

It is seen as part of the solution to the food security challenge posed by population expansion at a time when climate change and geopolitics threaten supply.

“This doesn’t really mean that we want to entirely replace honeybees in nature, but what we sometimes hear from the people in the relevant field is that there are really good cases where we can’t rely on honeybees anymore, such as like indoor farming, where we can’t really have honeybee homes in it because of safety issues or some environmental issues. So in that case, we can start thinking of using our robot, if it works well, for tools like indoor farming,” added Kim.

Despite the team’s improvements, the robotic insects still cannot match the capabilities of natural pollinators. However, the researchers aim to improve the robots’ flight time and precision to enable them to land and take off from the center of a flower.

The research was published in the journal Science Robotics.

A Farmer Can Dream, Right? Tesla Robots As the Farm Labor Force of the Future?

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 18:24:44 GMT

With a visual form ripped straight from a skin-crawl inducing robot thriller, Tesla’s new AI-bot, Optimus, is eliciting strong reactions from tech advocates and flip-phone touting technophobes.

Let’s indulge our imaginations for just a second and imagine how a farmer could put one of Musk’s $20,000 helper robots to work around the family farm in, say, the year 2040. I use 2040 because, even though the prototypes in the video below look awesome, it turns out the AI behind it needs more work before any farmer would feel safe setting a squad of them loose on the farm.

Our own Clinton Griffiths was also inspired by Optimus’ unveiling. In his upcoming column in the November issue of Farm Journal, Clinton gets right to the heart of the issue, and that’s whether the bots will pan out on the farm?

The real test, he writes, “will be whether it can keep its glossy finish motoring along regardless of whether or not the field is mud-free.”

I couldn’t agree more, Clinton. Serving up fancy drinks during an unveiling party on a glitzy Hollywood film studio lot is one thing. Standing up to all the dust and heat and tough conditions of your average farm or ranch is a different beast altogether.

In that vein, we offer up the following farm chore list Optimus can take over from here on out.

No, seriously Opti, you don’t need our permission. Just go ahead and take care of these few little things every single day for the rest of time, and we’ll be off, I don’t know, fishing at the lake with the kids, rocking on the front porch, or something.

Farm equipment maintenance tech
Director of crop protection jug disposal
Backpack spraying around-the-clock weed warrior
Chief grain bin inspector
Head ladder climber
Irrigation pivot inspector general
Head high in July crop scout
Pig loader and unloader extraordinaire
Master bottle mixer and calf feeder

Now that you’ve read my list, I’m curious how you would use a robot that walks, talks and moves like a real human (and never gets tired, bored or spends 20 minutes staring at its phone) on your farm? or click

Share your robot wish list by clicking the green “Respond Here” button or click here .

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John Phipps: You'll Have to See This to Believe What Artificial Intelligence Can Now Do

Wed, 21 Sep 2022 14:02:24 GMT

Fair season is winding down, with its images of earnest young men and women leading impeccably groomed animals in a show ring. At least that’s what pops to mind for many of us in agriculture. But other stuff goes on at the fairs, and this year at the Colorado State Fair, there was a bombshell event seemingly unconnected to agriculture.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Colorado State Fair (@colostatefair)

This is the first-place entry in the digital art division. The title is “Space Opera Theater,” only in French, which I would only mangle hopelessly. I know, it looks like a slick science fiction book cover, but the uproar is over how it came to be.

Using an artificial Intelligence program called Midjourney, artist Jason Allen of Pueblo, Colorado created this image without a brushstroke or pencil line – he entered some carefully chosen text into the program and then took the image to be printed on canvas.

While the picture may not be your preferred type of art, such AI programs can tackle styles and subjects from impressionism to portraiture. In fact, they are doing so with rapidly increasing skill, originality, and acclaim. Using a process called diffusion, the program somehow matches the text with millions of online images into a mashup that has the art world flummoxed and artists terrified.

One reason is while we could kind of imagine AI taking over sophisticated automation and even complex management tasks like hiring decisions, we have considered the mystical skills of creative work like art of music as beyond the reach of computers. This picture is early proof that assumption may not be completely true.

While AI works essentially by trial-and-error on a massive scale, it can learn to pick out those very few results that people connect with, just like it sorts resumes with remarkable success to find the right people to hire. AI is also muscling into creative fields like writing – you have probably already read a computer-generated newspaper story, especially on the sports or financial pages. AI is even being used to write humor – a troubling development for me.

As the programs keep improving, which they do on their own, the output is slipping unnoticed into more and more creative fields, such as fashion design, for example. I’ll talk more about how AI might surprise us in agriculture, but we probably won’t believe it until, like Colorado fair-goers, we see it with our own eyes on our own farms.