Robotic Farmer

Scientists in Denmark are developing an agricultural robot for identifying and eliminating weeds. While this might seem like a relatively easy task, it actually requires a lot of machine intelligence to pick out the weeds among the crops. The robot is still in the early stages of development, but the researchers hope that it will ultimately lead to a reduction in the amount of herbicides used by farmers and therefore cut costs. Called Hortibot, the semi-autonomous robot is a navigational platform designed to have different agricultural tools fitted to it to either mechanically remove weeds or precision-spray them with herbicide. "The original purpose was to build a robot that was simple to use and could be operated by an unskilled worker," says Rasmus Jørgensen, an agricultural scientist at the Institute of Agricultural Engineering at Aarhus University, in Horsens, Denmark.