Скачать или смотреть The future of farming: precision farming with robots - Simon Blackmore

Imagine a future where small smart machines or robots move around the field establishing, tending and selectively harvesting the crops.

'Normal' agriculture uses massive amounts of energy; from the energy associated with producing pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, through fertilisers to the tractors themselves and the fuel to power them. This energy is often wasted as it goes off-target, is expensive and will become more so in the future. Smarter machines should use the minimum amount of energy to turn the natural environment into useful agriculture thus cutting out wasted energy and reducing costs. As agricultural engineers we recognise the natural variability found on our farms and can change the management and treatments to suit. We can also reduce the scale of treatments from farm scale, to field scale, to sub-field scale and even individual plant treatment. New technologies are being introduced into agricultural machines. Most new large tractors have auto steer systems that allow much more accurate positioning and driving to avoid overlap of field treatments. This saves on average 10-15% of time, fuel, treatment costs and wages. Can we develop a new system of machines that can assess variability in real time and only use a minimum amount of energy to support crop development? The answer is clearly yes.

00:00 Introduction
03:44 National Centre for Precision Farming
07:27 Farming systems
09:46 Economies of scale
15:27 Limitations of big machines
17:02 Compaction
21:44 Farming with robots
26:55 Robotic seeder
31:18 Crop scouting
32:18 2nd Generation UAS
33:13 Agricultural Drone Centre
36:20 Robotic weeding
38:11 MicroDot spraying
44:48 Selective harvesting
50:22 Conclusions

Speaker profile: Simon Blackmore is Professor and Head of Robotics and Automation at Harper Adams University and Director of the National Centre for Precision Farming. Simon leads the research in the UK on precision farming and agricultural robotics and has a world-wide reputation. Simon’s research involves multidisciplinary collaboration across universities, commercial partnerships and research projects include autonomous tractors, laser weeding, robotic phenotyping and robotic harvesting.

Filmed at the Gatsby Plant Science Summer School, 2017.