Robotic farming

IN WESTERN countries, many farmers are passing on the back-breaking work to their intelligent and hardworking service robots. These mean machines can do just about any physical work in the farm – weed, prune, fertilise, assist in pollination, sow, feed farms, and herd animals – and they can go it alone, too. Thanks to cutting-edge sensors, GPS, computerisation, and a whole lot of automation, robotics is increasingly becoming a part of farming life. In 2012, field robots represented a 33% share of all service robots sold. They appear to contribute well to productivity and a farmer’s ability to compete, so much so that service robotics have earned their own platform and lecture series in Automatica 2014, the automation and mechatronics fair to be held from 3-6 June in Munich, Germany. At the show, the Forum in Hall B5 will be dedicated to lecture series on the topic.

The German Ministry of Economics’ joint project marion (mobile autonomous cooperative robots in complex value chains) is setting new trends. Part of the project is work by CLAAS, an agricultural technology expert that is developing a planning system that calculates routes for combine harvesters and infield transporters that coordinate with one another. Important parameters are filling levels, harvested space, fluctuating yields and the position and speed of the GPS-controlled machines.

“Together, machines that coordinate with one another are more efficient than if each machine acts alone,” says Dr Hermann Garbers, managing director for Technology and Quality at CLAAS.

“The results of the marion project must be integrated further into existing technology,” says Prof Dr Joachim Hertzberg, head of the field office of the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence’ (DFKI) Robotics Innovation Centre at Osnabrück University. “Doing so will give machines that have been tried and tested more autonomy and intelligence.”

Automation helps conserve resources

The Danish company Kongskilde Industries A/S developed the Vibro Crop Robotti agriculture platform, an independent module with an electrical belt drive for connecting various types of equipment. This allows the robot to plant seeds and mechanically remove weeds, especially for row crops. Farmers use fewer resources to get higher yields. With sensor-based measuring technology they can protect the environment through targeted fertilization and use of less chemicals. “The technology in agricultural robotics is very advanced,” says Ole Green, head of Strategic Development at Kongskilde. “In the next few years, a number of new products will show up on the market that will increase automation in plant production.”

High-tech for an intact environment

A Danish original, Robovator is for selective hoeing in row crops. Developed by F. Poulsen Engineering ApS, it uses digital cameras that recognise weeds based on the height of the plant and send a pulse to the hydraulic tines, so that the hoeing tools swivel in and out. The gardener can intervene and change settings manually at any time.The Robovator has its own electrical and oil supplies and moves at speeds of up to 4 km/h, even at night, and it is particularly suitable for organic farms that want to weed their crops without chemicals. “We are moving away from weeding with chemicals and toward mechanical solutions—both in organic and conventional agriculture," explains Frank Poulsen. “The reasons for this are regulations on the use of herbicides and increased demand for sustainable food production.”

Netherlands-based Lely Industries has an entire line of robot milking systems, from stall cleaning systems to automatic feeding systems and the Lely Astronaut milking robot. The robots recognise feeding signals and adapt the composition and quality of the feed and the feeding technique to suit demand. Serge Loosveld, software engineering manager, is proud of his collaboration with Lely Triodor in Instanbul, which specializes in software development, HMI interfaces, mobile apps and embedded software for machines: “Together we developed the first web-based management system,” he says.“It provides nearly 10,000 dairy farmers around the world with data about the health, productivity and welfare of their cows as well as farm-specific information on herd management. IT increases productivity and quality and cuts costs.”