UK Developing Intelligent Agricultural Harvesting Robots

UK scientists developing intelligent harvesting robot to save farms up to £100,000 a year

Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington have developed imaging technology to be used in an intelligent harvesting machine that could minimise wastage and solve an impending labour shortage for UK farmers.

Annual waste for certain crops can be up to 60% - which can mean up to £100,000 of lost revenue for an average farm every year, according to farmers who were consulted during research. Falling number of migrant labourers means that healthy crops cannot be gathered and so farms are losing crops due to harvesting at the wrong time.

NPL 's scientists are working with KMS projects and Vegetable Harvesting Systems (VHS) to turn the technology into an intelligent harvesting machine, which can look beneath the leafy layers of a crop, identify the differing materials, and enable precise size identification. This can be used to develop a fully automated harvesting robot, which would be able to fill the gap left by the labour shortage.

Technorati Tags: UK, agriculture, AI, robots

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Cuba: Waiting for the Ox

In Cuba, the ox may be mightier than the tractor - Boston.com

In this Aug. 6, 2009 photo, farmer Diosdado Mena works his oxen in a field in Los Palacios, Cuba. Cuba may rely more heavily than ever on oxen to save fuel normally used by heavily machinery. In a speech to lawmakers last weekend, Raul Castro extolled the value of oxen, saying a pilot program promoting urban farming and relying on the beasts of burden in the central province of Camaguey would be expanded to the rest country.

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