I had an interesting phone call today from the people that are bringing this product to market, with the first units going into the field march 2015.
The first commercial units will be smaller tractors attached to a weedit, spraying summer fallow in southern Queensland.
Its amazing how new technologies feed off each other to the development of something new that a few years ago wasn't possible.
Prior to affordable mapping software like Google maps, this would have been very difficult.
Add a small off the shelf tractor, a computer, GPS system, and a WeedIt, and you have feasible robot.
The autonomous vehicle has been fitted with extra motors and electronics to control the steering, brake and throttle. These additions are all on a Controller Area Network (CAN) which is then connected to a standard PC running a robot operating system. Further additions include an inertial navigation system, cameras, and a laser sensor which all sit on an ethernet network, which is also connected to a WiFi or 3G network. A spray tank and boom system is attached to the rear of the vehicle for the actual weed-spraying.
Because it can be retrofitted to smaller cheaper machines and works 24/7 doesn't need to be a huge expensive machine to achieve impressive work rates, in fact you could envisage several small machines working autonomously to achieve the same job at half the cost of traditional methods.
The other great thing is that because of its reduced capital cost, will be affordable to large as well as smaller farmers, so will bring great new efficiency's to agriculture.
Farming has been through the mechanisation phase and is rapidly moving to automation and robotics, similar to the car industry a few years ago.
An Autonomous seeder is the next logical step.
We are meeting with the partner's that are bringing this to market in January, so will know more then.
Has potential to fit to one of our ATVs or smaller tractors.
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