And on His Farm He Had a Robot

In some agricultural regions of the UK, persistent labor shortages result in perfectly good produce spoiling in the field before it has the chance to be harvested. In fact, crop loss for want of timely harvest can exceed a full half of a crop.

It's a terrible waste and it imposes large financial losses on growers. Fortunately, as Farmer Brown puts his boots on for another day in the fields, a high-tech solution to rooting out such losses is booting up as well.

Scientists at the UK's National Physical Laboratory are at the helm of a public-private partnership resulting in robotic crop monitoring, measurement and harvesting. Relying on several bands of electromagnetic wave — radio, microwave and infrared — the applications are capable of detecting plant characteristics above and below the soil surface, providing detailed guidance on precisely when and where to target harvesting activities.

And the matter of the harvesting itself is next up for the design team. Project engineers are currently exploring combining these crop-sensing capabilities with crop-gathering automation, with the vision of an all-in-one device that both knows where and when to pick, and is able to do so.

The team deliberately selected a challenging vegetable to test their hardware: cauliflower. While the vegetable is oddly shaped and has the edible parts mostly obscured by a full complement of leaves, the robotic farm hand has proven successful in not just identifying ripe and fully grown plants, but in swiftly calculating an overall crop yield based on the sum total of its measurements.

Photo courtesy of Richard Webb