Presentation of a robot-farmer with artificial intelligence called SwagBot held in 2016. Now the company has raised $4.6 million investment and plans to bring his creation to the broader market over the next year.
SwagBot has undergone during this time significant improvements — for example, he is now able to perform most functions independently, we need only give him a few lessons. This includes the recognition of weeds for weeding and monitoring the growth of the grass in the pasture and control the growth of plants in the beds. The robot can even graze cattle, at least, such a function it has, and whether cows or sheep listen to the car as Sheepdog is an open question.
If he SwagBot is focused on large fields and large-scale work, his younger brother Farmhand Digital created for small farms. In fact, it duplicates the functions of the older model, but has a smaller size, cheaper to operate and must compete with similar solutions in emerging markets. Presentation of new items is expected in a few months.
The success of projects like SwagBot, clearly indicate – the coming decade will be marked by a revolution in agriculture. We cannot predict what car and where, but Autonomous farm system with AI will surely find a use. Machine learning and new technologies against the vagaries of the weather, diversity of farmers ‘ problems and monotonous work is exactly what can produce a revolution in the industry that hasn’t changed, actually, since Neolithic times.
Source — Agerris