Robotics and artificial intelligence for agriculture - Hello Future Orange

A machine that targets weeds and crops at a rate of 20 plants per second, before treating them with millimetrically accurate sprays of weed killer or fertiliser: this is part of the astonishing specification for the latest machine from Verdant Robotics, a Californian company that claims to have built the market's most-advanced farming tool. Christened the SprayBox, the robot, which is designed to be attached to the rear of a tractor, is equipped with an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can identify and map plants, centimetre by centimetre, using visual recognition algorithms. Offering farmers a huge gain in productivity, the SprayBox can treat 500,000 plants per hour, while using only a twentieth of the chemical products required by more conventional methods: an optimisation of resources that could considerably limit negative impacts on the environment associated with industrial agriculture. At the same time, Verdant Robotics offers to use machine learning to process data collected by the SprayBox and to provide farmers with information on risks faced by their crops year after year. French start-ups are also on the cutting-edge of emerging technologies. In Rennes, Dilepix, a spin-off from research at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) is developing artificial-intelligence tools to monitor livestock, insects and agricultural machinery.