The agriculture of the future: robots arrive at the farm
The first autonomous farm in the US uses artificial intelligence and replaces human farmers with robots, to produce more crops in less space throughout the year ... and without land.
Agriculture is one of the oldest and most permanent activities of humanity to feed itself, but now an American company is preparing to reinvent it taking advantage of advances in botanical sciences and two of the most powerful technologies: robotics and artificial intelligence or AI. This is how the robot Angus arrives at the farm.
The firm Iron Ox has opened its first autonomous farm in San Carlos (California, USA). In it they produce food through a series of machines that cultivate quietlytens of rows of green leaves in a white room similar to a laboratory, supervised by a computer program called The Brain.
The main protagonist of this automated production plant is the robot Angus,composed of a mechanized arm that is responsible for cultivating, handling and serving edible plants, located in large rectangular hydroponic trays (for cultivation in water, without soil), and by a transport module that moves the trays inside the farm facilities.
"Angus has an automatic learning software that allows you to identify and remove those plants that show signs of being affected by pests or diseases, before they can infect healthy plants, in a combination of robotics and AI, which allows them to cultivate better products, "according to Brandon Alexander, co-founder and CEO of Iron Ox.
The farmer of the future
This first farm under roof that is already in full production, is focused on increasing the availability, quality and taste of green leafy vegetables, including romaine lettuce, butterhead lettuce and kale, as well as culinary herbs such as basil, cilantro and chives, according to this company.
"This cultivation system is not limited to adding robots to agricultural production, but implies that everything that surrounds these machines, including a hydroponic cultivation system of its own, has been developed with a focus on robotics," according to Alexander , who worked in the robotics laboratory Willow Garage and in Google X, as a software engineer for drones.
He adds that repetitive and labor-intensive tasks such as harvesting, sowing and inspection of plants, which are performed thousands of times a day by workers on conventional indoor farms, are ideal for robots to do.
"In addition to robotics, Iron Ox has integrated AI learning technologies and computer vision into production, achieving their robots can respond to the needs of each plant individually ", he points.
The robotic arm, capable of recognizing and analyzing plants at the submillimeter scale, and the mobile transport module, equipped with a technology similar to that of a self-propelled car, sensors and computer vision in 3D, were designed and developed to work joint, according to this signature.
The AI software of this productive ecosystem nicknamed Brain It works like the big brain that controls all the production, monitoring the data that is generated, ensuring that all the parties work in a cohesive way and controlling the environment in real time, they add.
Both the transport module and the robotic arm, which they work autonomously in a cultivation space of about 185 square meters, they are continuously transmitting data to 'Brain', which processes them together with the data received from the sensors of the entire installation, and controls the robots indicating when, how and where to act.
A human touch with the robots
"While technology takes over production, a team of experts in botanical sciences, it focuses on ensuring the health of plants, maximizing crop growth, optimizing and standardizing operating procedures, and ensuring the safety of food throughout the system, "explains Alexander.
The one of these specialists in botany is not the unique "human touch" that this productive process undergoes, since the sowing and part of the works of 'postharvest', like the harvesting of the lost leaves and the packaging, are carried out by people, according to the British newspaper The Guardian who witnessed the start-up of this installation.
"We not only grow affordable products sustainably, but we are also capturing an enormous set of processable data, which we use to make sure every plant that leaves our farm is perfect, and to develop highly accurate algorithms to identify their diseases," says Jon Binney, co-founder and technical director of Iron Ox.
Alexander and Binney consider that traditional agriculture does not work properly to supply food to a growing population, and believe that autonomous agriculture can solve this problem in part, by allowing 30 to grow more products per acre (4046,85 m²) than traditional farms, requiring less human labor and consuming less energy.
Through this technology, they aspire to solve the three major concerns transmitted to them by farmers with what they contacted in an investigation prior to the development of this system: the shortage of labor, the instability of the climate and the long distances that the products had to travel agricultural from the place of production to the place of consumption.
This productive system, which harnesses the sun, increases the flow of light reaching the plants through high efficiency LED lighting, and uses a hydroponic crop that spends less than 90 less water than traditional agriculture, is more sustainable in terms of environmental and energy costs compared to other modern farms, they say.
Large-scale robotic agriculture
"The robotic agriculture that uses the Iron Ox approach is absolutely scalable, that is, it can be applied at large scales and, although no specific estimate is available, it is estimated that it could produce a large part of the plant foods consumed by the inhabitants. of a city ", informs Efe Meredith Klee, in charge of the communication of the firm.
"By automating the entire cultivation process and collecting the largest data set about its production, Agricultural production will be drastically improved and cleaner and fresher products will be obtained ", on the other hand, Vic Singh, of Eniac Ventures, which finances Iron Ox.
In addition to ensuring that each plant grows in the best way from planting to harvest, this type of farms will provide local communities with the most demanded varieties of vegetables and edible herbs, very fresh and throughout the year, regardless of the limitations of seasonality and price fluctuations, according to this Californian firm.
Iron Ox plans to sell its fresh products in restaurants, supermarkets and grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay at the end of 2018, to take them to 2019 throughout the region and to open several robotic farms in the following years. IA, near the urban centers to reduce the time and cost of delivery of the vegetable edibles.
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