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A Robot Sphere Is Rolling Over to Save Farmers' Jobs

Farmers are betting that automation will be the savior, not the downfall, of their struggling industry.
Image: Rosphere

In a refreshing break from the robots-are-stealing-our-jobs bedlam, some farmers are betting that automation will be the savior, not the downfall, of their struggling industry. Advances in robotics are coming at an increasingly faster clip, and robots are now replacing the tractors that replaced the animals and humans tending and sowing crops. The age of robo-farming is upon us, and at least some forward-looking farmers are actually pretty psyched about it.

The latest innovation comes from a team of cybernetics researchers from Universidad Politécnica in Madrid. It's called Rosphere—a portmanteau for “robot sphere,” which is exactly what it is.

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The spherical robot moves by manipulating its center of gravity with a swinging weight—a principle not much more complicated than a hamster running in a cage. The movement is totally autonomous, though there's a remote control backup option in case the bot gets stuck or lost.

It's a pretty cool innovation—a machine that moves on its own without feet or wheels. But the researchers are more interested in how it can be used: namely, for rolling around uneven terrain in order to monitor crops and soil conditions on farmland.

The dream, once researchers are done prototyping, is that the bot can move over the land and through the crops without disturbing them the way that feet—mechanical or human—might do. Its sensors can then gather information to help farmers improve their technique.

Futuristic-minded farmers hope automating more and more tasks will attract more people back to the field. Better output, less physical labor, more cool gadgets.

In fact, last week the robotics department at Australia's University of Technology received $3 million from the state to put toward developing robotics to boost farm productivity, which they expect will save  $620 million a year in the wheat industry alone. "There is the potential to make agriculture a lot more exciting for the younger generation if it is seen to be this highly productive, highly profitable venture with a whole bunch of hi-tech equipment in it," a university professor told Australia's Weekly Times.

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This high-tech equipment is already proliferating through the agribusiness. Automatic milking, or "AM" for those in the know, is becoming so popular in Europe a report earlier this month predicted that by 2020 a fifth of all cows in Europe will be milked by robots.

"A special sensor detects whether they need to be milked," the Canadian Broadcasing Channel explained.  "If they’re ready for milking, the cows are led into a special pen where a robotic arm cleans the cow’s udder. Once clean, a laser-guided sensor determines the shape and location of the cow’s teats, suctions on, and collects the milk."

Questions about ethics and safety aside, the business savvy can’t be denied.

Two years prior, biotech scientist David Dorhout invented Prospero, a five-legged swarming farmbot that automates the process of planting seeds and harvesting crops using a combination of swarm technology and game theory. And recently, low-flying drones able to get detailed images of cropland are promising to be the future of precision agriculture.

In the nation's early days, nearly half of Americans were farmers, now it's only one in 50, and the hangers-on are struggling to make ends meet.  Can robots revolutionize the industry? It's complicated, but the hope is yes, provided the machines don't rise up against the farmers—a concern the creators of Rosphere took to heart.

After testing the ball in the field, they also rolled the robot around near actual humans, to make sure it wasn't a threat to their safety. Better safe than sorry.