Agriculture Revolution: Agricultural Robots Boost the Emergence of "Unmanned Farms" Globally

In recent years, rapid population growth, increased pressure on food supplies and declining agricultural labor force push the demand for agricultural robots. Whether building "smart agriculture" or developing "unmanned farm", agricultural robots are well-deserved protagonists.

Several centuries ago, the industrial revolution and technological innovations have greatly enhanced our use of the earth's resources. However, as the population continues to expand, in order to meet the sharply increased demand for food, the future food output will double the current output of food at least. Simultaneously, unfavorable factors such as global warming and urbanization are restricting the growth of crops and grain, output growth is rather difficult. Then how to solve the agricultural problem become top urgent!

In this situation, it is even more important to promote the development of agricultural modernization to the deeper level. Nowadays, the development of cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data and internet of things is changing the era. With the agricultural production mode moving forward from mechanization to digitization, the precision agricultural technology has quietly changed the traditional mode of agricultural production. The high-end intellectualization stage has come. This is the blueprint of future agricultural development.

Currently, agricultural robots have been able to complete sowing, planting, tillage, picking, harvesting, weeding, sorting and packaging work, mainly used in unmanned tractors, unmanned aerial vehicles, material management, seeding and forest management, soil management, grazing industry management and animal management.

Many countries see the broad prospects in agricultural revolution and speed up agricultural robot research and development. For instance, the team led by Professor Stephen of the University of Illinois has developed a new robot. The agricultural robot uses a combination of GPS and laptop to guide the crawler wheels moving between the plants. The robot is equipped with a hyper spectral, HD thermal imaging camera, weather monitor and pulsed laser scanner sensor. These devices allow it to collect phenotypic data such as plant stem diameter, height and leaf area, and crop environmental conditions such as temperature and soil moisture content. They can then use this information to build a 3D computer model for each plant to predict its growth and development, and to estimate the yield of the individual plant and the entire crop.

With the promotion of agricultural robot applications, the concept of "unmanned farm" is gradually emerging. The British "Daily Mail" reported that a group of British agricultural engineers are trying to create the world's first unmanned farm, without anyone entering the farmland to complete the entire process of digging, sowing, irrigation until the harvest, and use unmanned aerial vehicles to monitor crop growth.

High precision components such as precision resistors are applied into agricultural robots, agricultural revolution provides more opportunities for electronics industry. Microhm electronics seizes the chance to research and develop a series of electronics power resistors for artificial intelligence.

Resource: gkzhan.com