farming – Looking Forward

It’s summer and time to catch up on some interesting tech news. This post is about robots going beyond their use in warehouses, factories or even as personal assistants – indeed, it’s about robots outdoors.

On the farm, in Australia, there’s the robotic LadyBird which

“was designed and built specifically for the vegetable industry with the aim of creating a ground robot with supporting intelligent software and the capability to conduct autonomous farm surveillance, mapping, classification, and detection for a variety of different vegetables.“

You can find out more at http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newscategoryid=2&newsstoryid=13686, which also lets you know that its developer, University of Sydney robotics Professor Salah Sukkarieh, was named last month as the "Researcher of the Year” by the Australian Vegetable Industry association.

From robots working hard in the fields, let’s go to robots having some fun on the road – HitchBot, which is the invention of two Canadian computer scientists. HitchBot plans to hitch rides across Canada this summer.

As HitchBot says on its website:

“I am hitchBOT — a robot from Port Credit, Ontario.

“This summer I will be traveling across Canada, from coast-to-coast. I am hoping to make new friends, have interesting conversations, and see new places along the way. As you may have guessed robots cannot get driver’s licenses yet, so I’ll be hitchhiking my entire way. I have been planning my trip with the help of my big family of researchers in Toronto. I will be making my way from the east coast to the west coast starting in July.

“As I love meeting people and hearing stories, I invite you to follow my journey and share your hitchhiking stories with me as well. If you see me by the side of the road, pick me up and help me make my way across the country!”

Going from the ground to the air, in the realm of semi-robotic flight, otherwise known as drones, there’s a new one that reminds me of Star Wars Flying Speeder Bike – without the pilot. One article describes this new drone from Switzerland as:

“an autonomous drone in a fully immersive rollcage that keeps it protected from whatever it might fly into — in this case, trees, but the robust safety of the thing means it might soon be perfectly applicable for combing disaster areas or any other tight spaces.”

Also from the end of last year, another drone was featured in a New Scientist article titled “Spider-drones weave high-rise structures out of cables”. This one was also developed in Switzerland at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich.

As the article notes:

The drones could make building much easier, says roboticist Koushil Sreenath at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "You just program the structure you want, press play and when you come back your structure is done,” he says. “Our current construction is limited, but with aerial robots those limitations go away.”

And these are just a few of the examples of robotics changing how we will get things done outdoors around the globe.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/91251932294/new-worldwide-robot-adventures]

Urban farming would seem to be an oxymoron. Yet, the idea of bringing farming into the heart of urban regions is – pun intended – cropping up everywhere.

(In this post, I touch upon on a small subset of recent activities on the urban farming front. If you’re interested, you’ll find lots more urban farming documented on the Internet.)

A couple of weeks ago, a New York Times article “Farm-to-Table Living Takes Root” reported on Agritopia, a neighborhood in Phoenix that focuses on farming. There have been as well reports of other farm-focused urban neighborhoods around the country.

Lack of available land at street level is also no limitation. Rooftop farms are being added to the tops of buildings in many cities. But why just stop with the tops of buildings?

Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier has been the modern prophet of the vertical farming concept that encourages building agricultural skyscrapers in large cities. One example – the largest in the USA – is FarmedHere, which last month opened an indoor vertical farm in Chicago.

In a much bolder vision last year, the architect Vincent Callebaut proposed a Dragonfly shaped vertical farm for the south end of New York City’s Roosevelt Island. (This is, alas, the same location of the future high tech, entrepreneurial campus of Cornell University and Technion Israeli Institute of Technology that former Mayor Bloomberg commissioned to emulate Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley, in turn, was once filled with orchards, not tech companies.)

If a real island, like Roosevelt, is not available within the city’s borders, then the answer is to build an artificial island. The folks at Blue Revolution Hawaii are hoping to do just that in Honolulu and follow in the early footsteps of other cities around the world with farming on artificial islands – see the article “Floating Farms” in this month’s Modern Farmer magazine.

This may seem like some new trend and, in some ways, it is – as it reflects the ways that the Internet is opening up possibilities for people.

But it is not completely new. My favorite examples come from New York City, yes, New York City. In the Queens section, John Bowne High School with a special focus on agriculture – and the program has been around since the end of World War I, originally in the old Newtown High School. Even in Manhattan, George Washington High School in the north end of the island has a chapter of the Future Farmers of America.

So the graduates of these schools won’t have to leave New York City to become farmers, even in the densest urban area in America.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/80777085555/urban-farming]

Tag: farming

New Worldwide Robot Adventures

Urban Farming?