Indoor Gardens with Robotic Workers as a Solution to the Decline in the Number of Workers in Agriculture

Talking about the use of technology in the agricultural industry, what we remember may only be limited to increasing numbers drone specially designed to help farmers and garden owners. But who would have thought that this discussion could actually continue into the field of automation, aka robotic labor.

This vision is being realized by a startup from America named Iron ox. The continued decline in the number of agricultural workers in the US has forced them to experiment with robotics in order to realize automatic gardens that can operate on their own without the help of human hands.

Although not yet fully successful, their efforts are already starting to show results. They just opened a hydroponic garden indoor in the city of San Carlos. The area of ​​the facility is only about 750 m², but its production capacity can reach 26.000 heads of vegetables per year, equivalent to a garden. outdoor which is five times as large.

The two types of robots employed include a large robot whose job is to move tub after tub filled with plants, and a robot whose job is to move weed by weed of vegetables to new tubs according to their developmental age.

In order for these robots to help each other, they need development that set everything up. Iron Ox developed it himself and dubbed it "The Brain". Some of his duties include monitoring nitrogen levels, temperature, and the location of each robot.

Almost all the work in the Iron Ox garden is handled by robots. For now, what has not been done is the seeding stage and harvest processing. In the future, Iron Ox hopes that these stages can also be automated with robots.

The harvest from Iron Ox's garden has not yet been sold while they are still negotiating with local restaurants and traders. Tens of thousands of heads of lettuce produced are temporarily stored in the local food warehouse, as well as being eaten in the canteen of Iron Ox's own employees.

What Iron Ox does is actually an example that robots or AI do not always have to be a scourge for human labor. The demand for vegetables continues to rise, while the number of workers falls; the role of automation and robots here is nothing but helping to solve problems.

In addition, Iron Ox also wants to shorten the travel time of vegetables from the garden to consumers, so that they get fresher vegetables. Since the workers are robots, Iron Ox doesn't have to worry about salary standards in urban areas, which are higher than in suburbs.

Sumber: MIT Technology Review.