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University of Illinois students show off Lego-based crop harvester
Believe us when we tell you that we've seen Legos used in ways its creators could have never, ever imagined. Thankfully, a team from the University of Illinois found a way to demonstrate a rather useful (read: not bizarre) technology with everyone's favorite building block. By setting up shop at the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers in Minnesota, students were able to show off an autonomous crop harvesting system that transferred heaps of BBs onto unloaders, which then hurried them away to meet artificial deadlines. The setup was configured using Robolab software, and aside from requiring the creators to dump BBs into the harvester, the entire show was put on sans human interaction. Granted, the idea behind all of this is far from fresh, but there's just something strangely satisfying about putting a stash of spare Legos to work for you.
HortiBot: the autonomous, GPS-enabled weed eradicator
HortiBot won't go down as the first robot with weed extermination as its sole mission in life, but this particular robot ups the ante in a serious way. Conjured up by a team of Danish agricultural scientists, the three-foot by three-foot autonomous machine is "equipped with a computer and GPS to find the exact location of weeds," and being that it's also reportedly self-propelled, you hardly have to keep an eye on it. Moreover, the device can be flanked by an array of weed-removing attachments depending on a farmer's specific needs, and promises to curb "herbicide usage by 75-percent." Currently, the cost of one Hortibot would run around $71,000, but the crew hopes to land a manufacturing partner and reduce those charges when it (hopefully) goes commercial.[Via Slashdot, image courtesy of HortiBot]
