Moving carefully along a row of apple trees, two of Australia’s newest agricultural workers check if the fruit is ripe or the soil needs water or fertiliser.
Australia is one of the leaders in the field and, with a minimum wage of $15.37 an hour and a limited workforce, has a big incentive to use robots and other technology, such as unmanned aircraft, to improve efficiency.
It hopes to tap fast-growing Asian neighbours, where swelling ranks of the middle class increasingly want more varied and better quality food, from blueberries to beef.
“The adoption of new technology is going to be crucial for Australia to maintain its competitiveness in terms of the global agricultural sector,” said Luke Matthews, commodities strategist at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
“If we don’t adopt new technology, we can give up on these high-flying ambitions of being the food bowl of Asia.”
Using such technology tooptimise the use of fertiliser can boost profitability at grain farms by 14%, according to a study by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
A robot effortlessly plucking fruit is some way off, though a range of simpler tasks are within reach, to add to existing technology such as automatic steering of harvesters.
Salah Sukkarieh, professor of robotics and intelligent systems at the University of Sydney and developer of Mantis and Shrimp, says the next phase aims for robots to do increasingly complex jobs, such as watering and, ultimately, harvesting.
“We have fitted them with a lot of sensors, vision, laser, radar and conductivity sensors – including GPS and thermal sensors,” said Sukkarieh.
The technology could have the biggest application in horticulture, Australia’s third-largest agricultural sector with exports of $1.71-billion in the last marketing year, since a fixed-farm layout lends itself better to using robots.
Robots and an unmanned air vehicle that are being developed at the University of Sydney had passed field tests at an almond farm in Mildura, Victoria state, said Sukkarieh.
Propelled by sets of wheels and about the height of a man, the robots were named after the native Mantis shrimp because of the marine crustacean’s 16 different colour receptors, capable of detecting up to 12 colours. Humans only have four, three of which pick up colours.
This capacity to recognise colour already allows the robots to sense whether fruit is ripe.
The data can then be processed by computer to determine what action the robot should take. This could be used to water or apply fertiliser or pesticides, or sweep and prune vegetation, and eventually harvest the crop. – Reuters