Archive 08.01.2023

In the Dutch province of Zeeland, a robot moves swiftly through a field of crops including sunflowers, shallots and onions. The machine weeds autonomously – and tirelessly – day in, day out.

“Farmdroid” has made life a lot easier for Mark Buijze, who runs a biological farm with 50 cows and 15 hectares of land. Buijze is one of the very few owners of robots in European agriculture.

Robots to the rescue

His electronic field worker uses GPS and is multifunctional, switching between weeding and seeding. With the push of a button, all Buijze has to do is enter coordinates and Farmdroid takes it from there.

‘With the robot, the weeding can be finished within one to two days – a task that would normally take weeks and roughly four to five workers if done by hand,’ he said. ‘By using GPS, the machine can identify the exact location of where it has to go in the field.’

About 12 000 years ago, the end of foraging and start of agriculture heralded big improvements in people’s quality of life. Few sectors have a history as rich as that of farming, which has evolved over the centuries in step with technological advancements.

In the current era, however, agriculture has been slower than other industries to follow one tech trend: artificial intelligence (AI). While already commonly used in forms ranging from automated chatbots and face recognition to car braking and warehouse controls, AI for agriculture is still in the early stages of development.

Now, advances in research are spurring farmers to embrace robots by showing how they can do everything from meeting field-hand needs to detecting crop diseases early.

Lean and green

For French agronomist Bertrand Pinel, farming in Europe will require far greater use of robots to be productive, competitive and green – three top EU goals for a sector whose output is worth around €190 billion a year.

“Labour is one of the biggest obstacles in agriculture.”

– Fritz van Evert, ROBS4CROPS

One reason for using robots is the need to forgo the use of herbicides by eliminating weeds the old-fashioned way: mechanical weeding, a task that is not just mundane but also arduous and time consuming. Another is the frequent shortage of workers to prune grapevines.

‘In both cases, robots would help,’ said Pinel, who is research and development project manager at France-based Terrena Innovation. ‘That is our idea of the future for European agriculture.’

Pinel is part of the EU-funded ROBS4CROPS project. With some 50 experts and 16 institutional partners involved, it is pioneering a robot technology on participating farms in the Netherlands, Greece, Spain and France.

‘This initiative is quite innovative,’ said Frits van Evert, coordinator of the project. ‘It has not been done before.’

In the weeds

AI in agriculture looks promising for tasks that need to be repeated throughout the year such as weeding, according to van Evert, a senior researcher in precision agriculture at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

‘If you grow a crop like potatoes, typically you plant the crop once per year in the spring and you harvest in the fall, but the weeding has to be done somewhere between six and 10 times per year,’ he said.

Plus, there is the question of speed. Often machines work faster than any human being can.

“With this robot everything is done in the field.”

– Francisco Javier Nieto De Santos, FLEXIGROBOTS

Francisco Javier Nieto De Santos, coordinator of the EU-funded FLEXIGROBOTS project, is particularly impressed by a model robot that takes soil samples. When done by hand, this practice requires special care to avoid contamination, delivery to a laboratory and days of analysis.

‘With this robot everything is done in the field,’ De Santos said. ‘It can take several samples per hour, providing results within a matter of minutes.’

Eventually, he said, the benefits of such technologies will extend beyond the farm industry to reach the general public by increasing the overall supply of food.

Unloved labour

Meanwhile, agricultural robots may be in demand not because they can work faster than any person but simply because no people are available for the job.

Even before inflation rates and fertiliser prices began to surge in 2021 amid an energy squeeze made worse by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this year, farmers across Europe were struggling on another front: finding enough field hands including seasonal workers.

‘Labour is one of the biggest obstacles in agriculture,’ said van Evert. ‘It’s costly and hard to get these days because fewer and fewer people are willing to work in agriculture. We think that robots, such as self-driving tractors, can take away this obstacle.’

The idea behind ROBS4CROPS is to create a robotic system where existing agricultural machinery is upgraded so it can work in tandem with farm robots.

For the system to work, raw data such as images or videos must first be labelled by researchers in ways than can later be read by the AI.

Driverless tractors

The system then uses these large amounts of information to make “smart” decisions as well as predictions – think about the autocorrect feature on laptop computers and mobile phones, for example.

A farming controller comparable to the “brain” of the whole operation decides what needs to happen next or how much work remains to be done and where – based on information from maps or instructions provided by the farmer.

The machinery – self-driving tractors and smart implements like weeders equipped with sensors and cameras – gathers and stores more information as it works, becoming “smarter”.

Crop protection

FLEXIGROBOTS, based in Spain, aims to help farmers use existing robots for multiple tasks including disease detection.

Take drones, for example. Because they can spot a diseased plant from the air, drones can help farmers detect sick crops early and prevent a wider infestation.

‘If you can’t detect diseases in an early stage, you may lose the produce of an entire field, the production of an entire year,’ said De Santos. ‘The only option is to remove the infected plant.’

For example, there is no treatment for the fungus known as mildew, so identifying and removing diseased plants early on is crucial.

Pooling information is key to making the whole system smarter, De Santos said. Sharing data gathered by drones with robots or feeding the information into models expands the “intelligence” of the machines.

Although agronomist Pinel doesn’t believe that agriculture will ever be solely reliant on robotics, he’s certain about their revolutionary impact.

‘In the future, we hope that the farmers can just put a couple of small robots in the field and let them work all day,’ he said.

Research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.

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This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation magazine.

Tech companies showed off their latest products this week at CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show, with new developments in video as well as lifestyle enhancements with beverage and makeup gadgets.

This all-in-one, agnostic, and powerful software is capable of computing the position and orientation of a mobile robot through 3D data processing, in real time!

By Mischa Dijkstra, Frontiers science writer

Researchers from the University of Leeds have developed the first mini-robot, called Joey, that can find its own way independently through networks of narrow pipes underground, to inspect any damage or leaks. Joeys are cheap to produce, smart, small, and light, and can move through pipes inclined at a slope or over slippery or muddy sediment at the bottom of the pipes. Future versions of Joey will operate in swarms, with their mobile base on a larger ‘mother’ robot Kanga, which will be equipped with arms and tools for repairs to the pipes.

Beneath our streets lies a maze of pipes, conduits for water, sewage, and gas. Regular inspection of these pipes for leaks, or repair, normally requires these to be dug up. The latter is not only onerous and expensive – with an estimated annual cost of £5.5bn in the UK alone – but causes disruption to traffic as well as nuisance to people living nearby, not to mention damage to the environment.

Now imagine a robot that can find its way through the narrowest of pipe networks and relay images of damage or obstructions to human operators. This isn’t a pipedream anymore, shows a study in Frontiers in Robotics and AI by a team of researchers from the University of Leeds.

“Here we present Joey – a new miniature robot – and show that Joeys can explore real pipe networks completely on their own, without even needing a camera to navigate,” said Dr Netta Cohen, a professor at the University of Leeds and the final author on the study.

Joey is the first to be able to navigate all by itself through mazes of pipes as narrow as 7.5 cm across. Weighing just 70 g, it’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

Pipebots project

The present work forms part of the ‘Pipebots’ project of the universities of Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, and Leeds, in collaboration with UK utility companies and other international academic and industrial partners.

First author Dr Thanh Luan Nguyen, a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Leeds who developed Joey’s control algorithms (or ‘brain’), said: “Underground water and sewer networks are some of the least hospitable environments, not only for humans, but also for robots. Sat Nav is not accessible undergound. And Joeys are tiny, so have to function with very simple motors, sensors, and computers that take little space, while the small batteries must be able to operate for long enough.”

Joey moves on 3D-printed ‘wheel-legs’ that roll through straight sections and walk over small obstacles. It is equipped with a range of energy-efficient sensors that measure its distance to walls, junctions, and corners, navigational tools, a microphone, and a camera and ‘spot lights’ to film faults in the pipe network and save the images. The prototype cost only £300 to produce.

Mud and slippery slopes

The team showed that Joey is able to find its way, without any instructions from human operators, through an experimental network of pipes including a T-junction, a left and right corner, a dead-end, an obstacle, and three straight sections. On average, Joey managed to explore about one meter of pipe network in just over 45 seconds.

To make life more difficult for the robot, the researchers verified that the robot easily moves up and down inclined pipes with realistic slopes. And to test Joey’s ability to navigate through muddy or slippery tubes, they also added sand and gooey gel (actually dishwashing liquid) to the pipes – again with success.

Importantly, the sensors are enough to allow Joey to navigate without the need to turn on the camera or use power-hungry computer vision. This saves energy and extends Joey’s current battery life. Whenever the battery runs low, Joey will return to its point of origin, to ‘feed’ on power.

Currently, Joeys have one weakness: they can’t right themselves if they inadvertently turn on their back, like an upside-down tortoise. The authors suggest that the next prototype will be able to overcome this challenge. Future generations of Joey should also be waterproof, to operate underwater in pipes entirely filled with liquid.

Joey’s future is collaborative

The Pipebots scientists aim to develop a swarm of Joeys that communicate and work together, based off a larger ‘mother’ robot named Kanga. Kanga, currently under development and testing by some of the same authors at Leeds School of Computing, will be equipped with more sophisticated sensors and repair tools such as robot arms, and carry multiple Joeys.

“Ultimately we hope to design a system that can inspect and map the condition of extensive pipe networks, monitor the pipes over time, and even execute some maintenance and repair tasks,” said Cohen.

“We envision the technology to scale up and diversify, creating an ecology of multi-species of robots that collaborate underground. In this scenario, groups of Joeys would be deployed by larger robots that have more power and capabilities but are restricted to the larger pipes. Meeting this challenge will require more research, development, and testing over 10 to 20 years. It may start to come into play around 2040 or 2050.” 

• PAPER – Autonomous control for miniaturized mobile robots in unknown pipe networks. T. L. Nguyen, A. Blight, A. Pickering, G. Jackson-Mills, A. R. Barber, J. H. Boyle, R. Richardson, M. Dogar, and N. Cohen. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 309.

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Our remotely operated forklifts allow operators to do their jobs from up to thousands of miles away. This is critically important to our customers, who have been dealing for decades with a labor shortage that recently has become even more acute than ever before.

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An unmanned semi-submersible vehicle developed at Washington State University may prove that the best way to travel in water undetected and efficiently is not on top, or below, but in-between.

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The field of microrobotics deals with miniaturized robotic machines at the millimeter scale. People are particularly excited about how these microrobotics applications could achieve things larger machines can’t. Here are five exciting ways they can push the boundaries.

Did you manage to watch all the holiday robot videos of 2022? If you did but are still hungry for more, I have a few more videos from Science Magazine featuring robotics research that were released during last year. Enjoy!

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By Paul Cureton (Senior Lecturer in Design (People, Places, Products), Lancaster University) and Ole B. Jensen (Professor of Urban Theory and Urban Design, Aalborg University)

Drones are already shaping the face of our cities – used for building planning, heritage, construction and safety enhancement. But, as studies by the UK’s Department of Transport have found, swathes of the public have a limited understanding of how drones might be practically applied.

It’s crucial that the ways drones are affecting our future are understood by the majority of people. As experts in design futures and mobility, we hope this short overview of five ways drones will affect building design offers some knowledge of how things are likely to change.

1. Creating digital models of buildings

Drones can take photographs of buildings, which are then used to build 3D models of buildings in computer-aided design software.

These models have accuracy to within a centimetre, and can be combined with other data, such as 3D scans of interiors using drones or laser scanners, in order to provide a completely accurate picture of the structure for surveyors, architects and clients.

Using these digital models saves time and money in the construction process by providing a single source thaOle B. Jensent architects and planners can view.

2. Heritage simulations

Studio Drift are a multidisciplinary team of Dutch artists who have used drones to construct images through theatrical outdoor drone performances at damaged national heritage sites such as the Notre Dame in Paris, Colosseum in Rome and Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.

Drones could be used in the near-future in a similar way to help planners to visualise the final impact of restoration or construction work on a damaged or partially finished building.

3. Drone delivery

The arrival of drone delivery services will see significant changes to buildings in our communities, which will need to provide for docking stations at community hubs, shops and pick-up points.

There are likely to be landing pads installed on the roofs of residential homes and dedicated drone-delivery hubs. Research has shown that drones can help with the last mile of any delivery in the UK, Germany, France and Italy.

Architects of the future will need to add these facilities into their building designs.

4. Drones mounted with 3D printers

Two research projects from architecture, design, planning, and consulting firm Gensler and another from a consortium led by Imperial College London (comprising University College London, University of Bath, University of Pennsylvania, Queen Mary University of London, and Technical University of Munich) named Empa have been experimenting with drones with mounted 3D printers. These drones would work at speed to construct emergency shelters or repair buildings at significant heights, without the need for scaffolding, or in difficult to reach locations, providing safety benefits.

Gensler have already used drones for wind turbine repair and researchers at Imperial College are exploring bee-like drone swarms that work together to construct blueprints. The drones coordinate with each other to follow a pre-defined path in a project called Aerial Additive Manufacturing. For now, the work is merely a demonstration of the technology, and not working on a specific building.

In the future, drones with mounted 3D printers could help create highly customised buildings at speed, but how this could change the workforce and the potential consequences for manual labour jobs is yet to be understood.

5. Agile surveillance

Drones offer new possibilities for surveillance away from the static, fixed nature of current systems such as closed circuit television.

Drones with cameras and sensors relying on complex software systems such as biometric indicators and “face recognition” will probably be the next level of surveillance applied by governments and police forces, as well as providing security monitoring for homeowners. Drones would likely be fitted with monitoring devices, which could communicate with security or police forces.

Drones used in this way could help our buildings become more responsive to intrusions, and adaptable to changing climates. Drones may move parts of the building such as shade-creating devices, following the path of the sun to stop buildings overheating, for example.

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.