As the world gets filled with more and more people, it has become inevitable that we are going to need to greatly increase the amount of automation that we currently employ in agriculture. However, one of the biggest challenges that have always faced farmers when it comes to robots, is how do you move them through the fields without destroying everything in their path? For some researchers at Georgia Tech, the inspiration for a solution came to them in the form of a sloth.
The engineers created a new sloth-like robot named Tarzan, that can swing along a rope, over the tops of the crops, and automatically monitor the status of the plants for the farmers.
“What that’s going to allow people to do is essentially have an automated way to analyze how their crops are doing and what their crops need in real time, and maybe even providing that to their crops without them having to go walk the field themselves.”
The long term goal is that these new robots will not only be able to cut down on the costs and labor involved in farming, but they will be so efficient that the solar powered terminators will be able to stay out in the fields for months at a time.