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 possibility that the impending robot revolution could well take most of the jobs away from humanity, leaving us as empty, directionless husks as we search for meaning in a world without toil has been widely discussed and debated. But it looks like it might be worse than we feared: Even our dogs are going to lose their jobs. Researchers from the University of Sydney and the Australian Centre for Field Robotics are working on a new robot that can monitor and herd farm animals, and keep an eye on farmers' crops, entirely on its own, according to Smithsonian Magazine. They recently put the bot through a series of tests on a farm, including running it over rough terrain and through streams, and herding cows and horses, to see if it could stand up to the task of working on its own on a farm. The jauntily named SwagBot was designed by the researchers to aid ranchers in some of Australia's more remote areas, where towns and neighbors can be hours apart, to herd livestock more effectively.

The Australian plate is the fastest continental plate on the planet, moving northwards and slightly to the east by about 2.7 inches (7cm) each year. Because of this movement, the continent has shifted by five feet (4.9 metres) over the past 22 years, making the country's co-ordinates slighty out of sync. To fix this, Australia is going to adjust its official latitude and longitude, putting the majority of the country back into alignment with the world's GPS systems. The Australian plate is the fastest continental plate on the planet, moving northwards and slightly to the east by about 2.7 inches (7cm) each year. Because of this movement, the continent has shifted by five feet (4.9 metres) over the past 22 years The movement of the Earth's tectonic plates makes land slide and causes a build up of tension.

SwagBot is the world's first robot cowboy, built to roam the rugged Australian terrain. While it will be doing some cowboy work, make no mistake: SwagBot is less like John Wayne and maybe a little more like a hyper-competent herding dog. It can corral cows and pull trailers, doing the type of work seen in the early parts of Brokeback Mountain. It can go through swamps, up hills, and over rocks. It's not the first robot to hit the farms of the Australian outback, which are vast, remote and often difficult to access.

It has a simple design--a silver box set atop four long legs with wheels for feet. It is battery operated and has a camera for remote operation. For now, it has two main jobs: handling animals and hauling things around. SwagBot has a hook on the back that allows it to pull around other equipment, which means it can be used to move feed from the barn to the field, for example. But it is clear that the primary purpose of the robot is to monitor and work animals such as horses and cows in a manner similar to a herding dog.

Enter SwagBot, a robot developed by the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at the University of Sydney. Created for the sole purpose of herding cattle, it can scuttle its way even across not-so-ideal terrain like farmland and even pull trailers across said terrain. It's the hope that SwagBot will eventually be able to manage the livestock across Australia's various regions. The robot is as efficient as it is rugged, proving it can get around ditches, swamps and a host of other obstacles that mean to keep it from doing its job. The next phase is to help SwagBot recognize whether an animal is sick or ailing.

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.

Humans have been farming for thousands of years since the first crops were planted and animals began being domesticated during the Mesolithic era. But technology could soon be squeezing us out of our traditional roles as farmers, as robots take to the fields. A robot that is capable of herding cattle and pulling trailers through the mud has gone on trial at a farm in Australia while another capable of pick broccoli six times faster than humans is being tested in Britain. SwagBot, an Australian farming machine, can herd cattle and pull trailers through mud, is being developed at the University of Sydney. At the same time, the University of Lincoln is building and testing a robot that can pick broccoli six times faster than humans. It can identify broccoli in fields with up to 95 per cent accuracy, the researchers say.