Ending global hunger has long been a critical goal for the global community. When the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals were released in 2014, ending hunger, food insecurity and all forms of malnutrition formed SDG2. Though there has been some progress in the fight against hunger – ongoing conflicts, climate change, economic downturns and the COVID-19 pandemic have been major barriers to achieving SDG2. As of 2020, according to the UN, 720 and 811 million people globally faced hunger, and current estimates suggest that 660 million people may still face hunger in 2030. Professor Salah Sukkarieh, a robotics engineer at the University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics, will this week speak at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Global Conference on Sustainable Plant Production in Rome (2-4 November).

"We've been using it for sheep, pigs and cows," said Zhao Jinshi, who studied at Cornell University and founded Beijing Unitrace Tech, a company developing software for the agriculture industry. "For pigs, it's more difficult because pigs all look the same, but dairy cows are a bit special because they are black and white and have different shapes," Zhao said as he checked on the technology installed in a pilot project here at a farm in Hebei province, outside Beijing. China has led the world in developing facial recognition capabilities. There are almost 630 million facial recognition cameras in use in the country, for security purposes as well as for everyday conveniences like entering train stations and paying for goods in stores. But authorities also use the technology for sinister means, such as monitoring political dissidents and ethnic minorities.

Salah Sukkarieh is Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Sydney, and Director of Research and Innovation at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. He has worked on autonomous systems for ports, mines, aerospace, and, most recently, agriculture. He recalls that when he started working on drone technology there were not many aerospace companies in Australia working on drones, and those that were were not interested in drones for agriculture or the environment as the business case didn't stack up financially. Australia's size and the remoteness of many rural areas have also been deterrents. There is strong interest from the agriculture industry in the use of robotics and automation to support farmers, and he is surprised by the number of students who are interested in working on these projects.

Robots may hold the key to preventing an industrial crisis in a country whose geography makes many key jobs undesirable. I knew Australia was big, but it didn't really hit me till I stood on a viewing platform hanging over a valley in the Blue Mountains. As I watched the land fall away below me, giving way to a valley of forest that stretched to the horizon, I could feel thousands of miles of silence sucking me in like a vacuum. Part of Australia's beauty is also its problem. Its untamed, uninhabited interior contains rich pickings, but there are few who want to go and get them.

For a change, Kevin Sanders has decided to let someone, or more accurately, something else count the apples in his orchard. This isn't the first time his idyllic farm down in Australia's Yarra Valley has played host to robots and their handlers, so Sanders knows what to expect. Moving soundlessly down the corridors between trees, an electric robot will scan each plant, identifying individual fruit and flowers. An algorithm is then used to classify and count the apples in each image and provide a yield estimation, a critical figure for farmers that will inform Sanders' plans to manage his orchards and the harvest. A fourth generation farmer, Sanders and his brothers have an interest in innovation that has created an unconventional operation.

The BoniRob is a multipurpose robotic platform for agricultural applications featuring independently steerable drive wheels and adjustable track width. Field farming is "the world's oldest profession," and not just because food plants have been cultivated for over 10,000 years. Its individual practitioners are old as well, the median age rising rapidly as young people abandon the farming lifestyle (the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports a median age of 58 in 2012, up from 55 in 2002, with other countries showing similar data). Those who remain face the same repetitive work of seeding, weeding, feeding, and harvesting, the tedium of each task increasing as farms grow ever larger. However, today's agricultural robots excel at repetitive tasks, letting farmers tend to more strategic matters.

Australia, we hear, is a big place. All that space is nice to have if you're raising cattle, except for the fact that you've got to keep track of them all somehow. For ranchers, this is a lot of work, and for cattle, it means that they don't get checked on very regularly. This would be a good opportunity for robots to step in and offer some assistance, but the problem is most robots would be crazy to try getting themselves around the kind of terrain that Australia is made of. In order to tackle the hills, dales, fields, cliffs, rivers, swamps, crocodiles, platypuses, echidnas, koalas, quolls, emus, kangaroos, wallabies, wombats, and dingoes (to name just a few common obstacles in Australia), researchers from the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney led by Dr. Salah Sukkarieh have designed and tested an all-terrain robot called SwagBot that's designed to be able to drive over almost anything while helping humans manage their ranchland.

An Australian professor is developing a robot to monitor the health of grazing livestock, a development that could bring big changes to a profession that's relied largely on a low-tech approach for decades but is facing a labor shortage. Salah Sukkarieh, a robotics professor at the University of Sydney, sees robots as necessary given how cattlemen are aging. The average age of a farmer in Australia is 52, according to the Australian Farm Institute. Sukkarieh is building a four-wheeled robot that will run on solar and electric power. It will roam pastures alongside livestock and monitor the animals using cameras, thermal sensors and infrared.

Farmers, put your feet up. Autonomous robots are already being used to inspect crops, count yields and dig up weeds – now they are shepherds too. Sheep and cattle farms in the Australian outback are vast as well as remote. For example, the country's most isolated cattle station, Suplejack Downs in the Northern Territory, extends across 4000 square kilometres and takes 13 hours to reach by car from the nearest major town, Alice Springs. The livestock on these far-flung farms are monitored infrequently – sometimes only once or twice a year – meaning they often fall ill or get into trouble without anyone knowing.