agriculture
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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]
Fruit-picking robots closer to reality
It looks like Vision Robotics' would-be fleet of agriculture robots is getting a little closer to reality, with the previous crude 2D sketches of 'em now replaced with slightly less crude 3D models (among other developments). Last we heard from the company, its scout robot was still a long ways from hitting the farm, but Wired News is now reporting that Vision expects to have a prototype of it ready sometime next year, with the larger harvester bot expected to follow two or three years after that. As before, the company plans to have the scout robots plot out the best fruit-picking route, which the harvester would then follow, grabbing hard to reach fruit with the utmost delicacy -- no doubt picking up a few humans' jobs along the way.
New Illinois robot seeks and destroys pesky weeds
Oh robots, is there anything they can't do? Apparently they can now search for and completely obliterate weeds, which really is something that we've always wanted them to do. A team of scientists at the University of Illinois have developed a robot that searches for weeds, chops them off, and then sprays herbicide all over the weed stump. The as-yet unnamed robot (which we'll be calling the weedinator for the time being) packs a Windows box with a 80GB hard drive (including WiFi), stands at about two feet tall, is a little over two feet wide and is nearly five feet long. Dr. Lei Tian, the lead scientist on the project, says that his new robot will improve efficiency of herbicide use by being precise about the amount of chemical use. We're not sure exactly what the WiFi is for, but it's probably used to brag to nearby robots about how many weeds it's just fragged.[Via Robot Gossip]
