Robotics

When a professor meets a farmer

January 19, 2023

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Robot developments and the research of social processes can occur side-by-side in RoboHouse. Because we really feel that expertise ought to be taught to look past its personal horizons, if we goal to make the office extra engaging. Why are individuals leaving the roles they used to like? What’s happening in essential sectors like healthcare, agriculture and manufacturing?

To discover these questions, we go into the sphere with scientists and innovators. Under the banner of FRAIM, our new transdisciplinary analysis centre devoted to the way forward for work. What do robotic specialists discover once they journey to locations the place individuals and robots work collectively?

Our newest instalment of FRAIM within the Field follows Maria Luce Lupetti as she meets with Henk Verdegaal on a gray November day. Last August Verdegaal, flower bulb farmer within the Netherlands, lastly noticed what an agricultural robotic may do on his lands. The Agbot by developer AgXeed was buzzing alongside, managed by a “smart and ready to use autonomy system with a full suite of vehicle peripherals.”

As the Agbot demonstration progressed, flower bulb farmer Henk Verdegaal grew to become increasingly satisfied of the potential of this specific approach of implementing robotics: “I feel this could be deployed for all things related to light ground work. The only issue is: can the system run for enough hours to make it worthwhile financially. That seems hard at the moment.”

Henk Verdegaal experiments with good expertise to scale back his use of pesticides. He expects that programs like Agbot also can scale back his reliance on labour and liberate him from subject work, in order that he can concentrate on extra necessary processes. Drones nevertheless, have thus far didn’t impress Verdegaal. Connectivity points triggered the drone to lose its approach and talk poorly with the digicam.

Assistant professor Maria Luce Lupetti, specialised in essential design for AI programs at TU Delft, arrives at a sobering perception throughout FRAIM within the Field: “In a place like a farm there are clear problems like not finding people to drive the truck. So it automatically makes you think: ‘OK, you make it autonomous. You have a clear need for that, the technology is there.’ But there are reasons why people have a hard time finding workers. These problems are systemic. There are financial issues, there are sustainability issues. There is a pressing housing crisis that makes the price of the land rise. A lot of different forces are coming together to influence the work of people on a farm.”

Watch the remainder of the sequence right here, or on our youtube channel.