The farming robots of tomorrow are here today | The Future IRL 

They call them farm bots but they missed a pun. They should’ve called them Robotanist

If they have a machine that can selectively spray herbicide on weeds, you'd think it'd be more cost effective to fit it with a knife to just remove the plant so there's no need to buy and use herbicides.

Still supportive of monocultures and not treating the soil as a living biota. We need polyculture with less synthetic inputs. The future of sustainable farming is a reintegration of older human knowledge not a further disconnect.

Awesome technology but I still think the future of farming is vertical indoor farming with no dirt, herbicides, or pesticides needed specially in leafy greens growing.

Robots will make our food more cleaner and greener. We can be happy about that ! *Hooray for less chemicals on farms !*

The only people who didn't know about this are people who live in cities. Anybody who lives where crops are grown already knows that it's 90% robots/machines & 10% people doing these jobs.

As a vegetable grower, all I can say is that small local farms are the solution for fresh produce... These technologies only discourage new farmers to join in as they need millions of capital to be productive. I started my organic farm with ~20k and I sell my produce the same price as conventional poison food.

Still need to fight food waste, cause damn its underestimated

They should make a robot that pulls weeds out that would be alot more cleaner.

At the tail end the gentleman said something that I had hoped folks would learn not to say. He said.. "Never". In the age we are in now I feel that we need to be very careful with our application of that word. In his case, I can imagine a time where a 4 humanoid robot that were programmed to pick crops would be delivered by autonomous vehicle to his small farm. The robots would then work his farm for 8-12 hrs and leave the produce in bins or in a cooling shed. These robots would work quietly even through a rainy night, recharging at the vehicle if needed. When done they would couple to the vehicle and drive to take a charge and then on to their next assignment. So I would caution folks to be very careful with the word.. "Never".

Eventually no humans needed except to eat the products.

Next evolution should be autonomous permaculture robots to produce monoculture quantities without pesticides and herbicides. The following generation should completely recycle all waste disposals.

We need a laser robot that targets bugs. In a split second it can acquire, identify, and zap a bug. A laser with a cone shaped focusing mechanism can target a very small area as well as short depth of field, so it wont damage what you want to keep. Like plants or good bugs. It’ll just quietly roam your garden, looking around and under, killing. Fulfilling its purpose as any good robot.

I like her joky style, her sense of humor:))

A mix of 4 things will happen due to automation in the future. People will start working less every week and companies will be forced to pay them more in return. People will lose "Real jobs" and start working dumb jobs that are niche and wierd just to have something to do. People will be paid basic income from the government and start collecting themselves into quasi commune like groups. Some other people being paid basic income will lock themselves in their rooms and live on Virtual reality. Then the Technological Singularity will happen and all bets are off after that.

Targeting just the weeds with insecticide is great. But the ultimate is physically killing them. And physically killing bugs before they can do damage. We'll want the same thing happening in the walls and floors of our houses. Robots will eventually be cheap enough to stand guard duty over every plant. And when the time is right for harvest, the robot that makes that judgement will call the harvesting robot. The coolest thing about this is it can all happen on your roof or the side of a building. Harvest can happen in time for dinner or in time to send it to market autonomously.

My first response to this was "why use pesticides?" Once you're paying attention to individual plants, there must be multiple ways of controlling weeds that can be tested and that won't be as damaging to the environment or resource-intensive as herbicide. How about steam, water jets or microwaves as a starting point? I'm not an engineer or farmer, but I know that as a general principle you don't know till you try.

Love the random cut to what looks like a British farm at 3:15

I'm an organic farmer and permaculturalist in Byron Bay Australia. This is the first imagery of robots farming I've seen and its giving me chills. Before becoming interested in farming, environmentalism and sustainability I had been a tech head my whole life, building and fixing computers for enjoyment.. almost entirely self-taught. I always believed AI would become larger than life and in these past few years I've seen it to be coming true. 10-20yrs from now the advances will be astronomical, 30-50yrs more and I feel we could be obsolete altogether, I think we aught to tread carefully.

Sounds good! Bring it on! + but I too, still think another promising future of farming is vertical indoor farming with no dirt, herbicides, or pesticides needed, but will need a good supply of energy for the indoor climate & lighting. Modular units would be ideal for smaller, more localized production. All good stuff! Very cool indeed!

My dad owns a couple hundred acres up North. He has vacation house there and leases most of the land for farming. Makes a nice chunk of passive income on it. That's the extent of my knowledge on farming.

Leave the industrial scale farming to the robots, but leave my tomatoes alone!

Moral of the story, Buy a land or property for growing crops and animals or learning practical high tech skills

Every piece of equipment with meshing cogs is now called a "robot." I have robotic toenail clippers. Life is so good since the robots took over.

Make me tempted to try farming. Canada is blessed with a very large land surface, low population, low birthrate and lot of new reclaimed lands from the artic ices.

Hanson Robotics is working on an agricultural application that can identify different types of crop diseases. It will one day be able to analyze pictures of diseased leaves, and determine a specific solution for dealing with the problem. Limiting the overuse of dangerous chemicals.

If the robot stays on top of its duties every day it can laser the weeds out before they grow too big. A flying drone could take care of that duty... gonna need a bigger battery pack. And get rid of huge tractors. Design small tractors without riders. If a farmer wanted to steer he could do it from his recliner at home, or allow the A.I. to do all the work. That would compact the soil less and be better for growing.

I wonder if they will make robots which can harvest permaculture farms some day? The assumption being that those robots would make permaculture commercially viable.

"HIGHER WAGES"!!! 😂😂😂😂😂

In my family most stayed in farming . Mostly science and engineering(soil science and “robotics”). We’re somewhat typical.Its not as if everyone is leaving.Many want to stay and are doing so with good prospects .

This is awesome. A big step towards solving world hunger.

The real state of the art will come with controlled growing environments. It's not out of the question that we'll see smallish greenhouses with robots, climate control and their own processing and storage facilities that will be more productive than rain forest environments in terms of biomass production, of which nearly 100% will be edible and processed into very good food. I mean even the roots of most plants we eat are nutritious and could be processed into perfectly good food. Take a greenhouse, employ aeroponics, add sensors to monitor the water and air. Have a single, or several robots meticulously attending to each and every plant and pest. Allow that a good number of insects especially are beneficial to plants and keep their numbers at a good level for them to do their work. The robots can use low powered lasers to kill unwanted insects and plants - So zero chemicals apart from plant nutrients. Using blue and red led lights the plants can get all the light spectrum chlorophyll can make use of and even the day night cycle can be adapted for maximum productivity. Even the atmosphere in such greenhouses can be tweaked for maximum productivity. Nothing wasted. Every plant grown can be automatically nurtured and every usable part, harvested, cleaned, processed and either stored, or packaged for fresh consumption and dispatched. Meticulously, 24/7. What's is not desirable to eat for people, might be processed into perfectly good fish food which if included in such a system could provide nutrients back to the plants and themselves be harvested for food. Robots could even, again meticulously, select plant lines with the very best characteristics. Some labs around the world are working on systems like this, but it's early days, and still far from the sophistication I am suggesting. With better robotics and neural networks wonders can be achieved. Not ever could people grow food better than such systems will. For me it is the type of technology both society in general and space exploration can benefit from. I honestly wish I could work on developing such systems.

Well, if they are here today, then, they are the farming robots of today. Just saying

You can grow more, faster, year round, without any herbicides or pesticides, with hydroponic farming.

Why spray the weeds ? Why not just have a robotic hand pull the weeds out , no dangerous / expensive chemicals required .

for the walnut harvester. Why not have a simple track that is literally just a colored line and markers for each tree in the row of crops. Then, teach the computer to follow the colored track and stop accordingly (at the markers). Basic autonomy solved!

It's not hard to fill farm labor vacancies. It's not hard to fill any employment vacancy. Any time someone tries to tell you that it is, it just means the employers are unwilling to pay a fair wage.

I love the idea of getting the use of chemicals reduced.

instead of pesticide, they should go one step up: just spray boiling water on the weed. it works even better, zero pollution, low cost. And / or destroy it mechanically too

Awesome!! This the future of Humanity!

BOON LOGIC has the fastest pattern finding software module now in the world for imaging, AI/ Machine Learning on Steriods

GOOD, the fewer Foreign laborers we need, the less trouble, crime, handouts, etc we will have. THIS is what the investors should be supporting. It will make our country safer.

Robots use way less diesel and hydraulic fluids and toxic lithium ion batteries than humans. Chemicals are fertilizer, pesticides ,herbicides, disinfectants. I miss the part where they said they don't have to use as many chemicals. The benefit of a robot is it can spray pesticides at levels that would kill a human applying the products to plants.

Please don't scroll down, just watch the damn video. So many experts under me.

Marijuana Bot! I think I am going to create a Startup for Marijuana Robots. I am going to call it Sky High Net.

6:30 instead of spraying each weed individually with herbicide just cut it or dig it!

Perhaps robotics and big data could reduce or replace monoculture farming I'm thinking along the lines selecting which crop to plant at that location of a field from a diverse pool of appropriate plants to best enrich the land and reduce need of supplements. Plot size etc. would need to be optimized in some fashion.

vertical farming is much too labor intensive. it is too energy intensive. aquaponics with sunlight and greenhouses offers the best of both worlds. the fish offer the nutrition to the plants the water regenerates life to both the fish and the plants and in places like calif where water is scarce and expensive, the ultra low water use makes sense

I feel like what's going to happen is that weeds are going to evolve to look like the crops you're growing. In fact I think that's how oatmeal evolved into its present form.

Maybe they’ll finally make a Reporter replacement robot.

Fully automated farms is the future.

Dey took our Jeerbs. Now the robots takkin der jeeerbs. LOL

It's all moving so fast, really incredible

It's kind of funny, I was just thinking why this type of technology hasn't been employed already in the agricultural industry and lo and behold , here it is in practical service. And more importantly, the technology provides real value and cost savings.

If humanity is stupid, a lot of people will lose their jobs and we'll end up with a lot of food/products available that nobody can actually buy and might then just be burned or thrown into the trash can right away. If humanity is smart, we'll produce a lot and find a way to distribute stuff so everyone can get at least the bare minimum (I mean, we were going to discard anyway, why not give it away or sell it cheaper?) I'm not betting on any of these scenarios, and I don't think I'll ever live long enough to see how that turns out, but I'm guessing the first option will happen at first, and the second will eventually happen some decades later.

We NEVER used any insecticide in our village. We always had fresh and healthy food.

Very exciting! Besides saving chemical use, reducing run off pollutants, and selective harvesting, this coupled with the corn starch nitrogen infused bacteria going on in Sweden, all of this tech can be boxed and sent to hard to grow regions. Starvation will be dramatically reduced if not eventually eliminated! AWESOME!

this is for Blueriver tech, instead of ur robot finding & spraying weedicide, why dont the robot cut down the weed coz it will become a organic matter for the soil and it will provide the nutrients. By this way, there is no need for chemistry.

Even better than robots that spray herbicide on weeds is robots that pull the weeds and don't use any chemicals.

maybe we could have robots harvest and plant a variety of crops in the same fields creating a much healthier bio diversity than traditional mono cropping!!

Cue joke about opening scene of Runaway. Ok, yes, I'm old.

More researches and investments should be done on Vertical Farming as well.

AI and machine learning is a blessing. Maybe it gets here just in time to redesign EVERYTHING, to prevent everything go up in flames

It's ironic that we will finally have developed robotic farming just in time for when the topsoil collapse prevents having giant unsustainable monoculture fields that the robots need to function. I mean, look at the video, giant fields of lettuce grown on what amounts to a dustbowl.

Instead of spraying a chemical on the weed, just use a robot arm to remove it and toss them into a container. It achieves two benefits, verification of weeds killed vs crop, and less expense on chemicals.

Nice! Also love the longer video :-)

For every robot now doing a job previously performed by a human, you've an unemployed human, or customer. Robots don't go home to a family with groceries.

It would definitely lower the farming cost, increase crops production, and more food, yeay, but at the same time I feel sad for farm labours who will lose jobs.

Again, the world population is 9 billion right now, and growing at 100m to 115m per year, so it will be 9.6 billion in 2025, and 10 billion in 2028, not 2050! Big difference!

Instead of robots for farmer's that have way to much land and are rubbish at growing plants, why not do competition give an acre to each person that can grow plants give them 3 years and who ever grows the most gets to keep the land and get more land and have the runner-up's work and learn from the winner's!

It is possible only for large scale farmers

If we can do this in large scale we can even create a free food society!

cool , dont even need a wall with robotic agriculture

This is the end of normal, labourers, and farming, don't forget what happened when the combined harvester and thresher machine, got invented a dromatic drop in the need for people to work the fields of the land of the owners ! and more profit but in the long run cheaper food for everyone and the ability to produce more and feed more people . This means that most of the food we will eat, in the future will be cleaner and and more healthy with less chemicals and her besides.

This will be a big problem for workers that do not have a degree as an engineer or pc genius

unfortunately lettuce is NOT the vegetable of tomorrow.

I'd probably say you were misusing "autonomy" to mean "automation."

Need to spray the weeds with something that ensures they become plant food and not waste, that's how the drones do it on my home world.

This lady is just so charming

Nobody wants to do manual harvesting, that's why combiners and harvesters were invented. And with manual labour in short supply, I'm not surprised machines are coming to the rescue! Farmers need help but there is no one to hire in N.America. Hence the machines.

well.... if a bot can see and spray,.... IT SHOULD BE ABLE TO PULL THAT WEED... AND VACUUM UP EVERY PEST. NO ?

Lettuce should probably be hydroponic anyway.

Those robots are nice, but it is important for humans not lose touch with nature (many of us already have). Knowing where food comes from and how it is processed is important.

It is great that we could use the technology to increase the efficiency for producing food that good for the environment and humanity. But that technology is still not being affordable for developing country that could waste the majority of the land.

Why not make a robot that kills weed with steam instead of chemicals? Or better yet, mulches them? Old guy is wrong; even small gardens will be automated within 5-10 years if not sooner.

Instead of spraying weeds, how about recognizing they are not the plant and plucking them?

From one alien to the next.

10million pictures? Those are rookie numbers! You gotta pump those numbers up! You’re nowhere near big data.

All a bunch of crap that costs millions & destroy millions of jobs. Wish none of them ever worked for those greedy selfish cold hearted farmers. Shameful!

??? I though the whole idea of the open southern boarder was to allow workers to do the jobs that Citizens don't want to do ?

Science becomes art

But will these machines run on Burritos?

hydroponics is the future let the ground recover

Still spays chemicals on your fields and gets into the roots to the plants.

No threat here, it’s what they do with it afterwards.

areofarming is another big factort 90%less water use and 1 million poinds of food in 30,000 square foot

Pigweed is Amaranth grain producer- why not cultivate it? I saw it Identified for eradication in the program!!!!!

As long they don't have their own consciousness then it will surely be fine. Should we still be paranoid that machines will replace most works though?

Limited space vs unlimited technology

Well, what about pesticides ? Are they gone to in the future ? That would make be eat more greens