On most lettuce farms, workers weave between rows to cull extra heads of lettuce crowding out the healthiest plants. The practice, called thinning, is labor-intensive and a labor shortage has made it difficult to find workers for the task.
In 2011, Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden came up with the idea to use robotics to mechanize lettuce thinning as part of their coursework in Stanford’s executive MBA program.
“Mention robotics in agriculture and people think it’s R2D2 and C3PO going into the field, but that’s not quite what we do,” says Heraud, the former head of precision agriculture for GPS tech giant Trimble Navigation.
The post Robot farmers in our future? appeared first on Trunews:.
from Trunews: http://ift.tt/1yWHZpd
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment