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11/17/12

Agriculture: Robots to feed entire mankind

The world's population is growing rapidly, while the number of people employed in agriculture is on decline. The food crisis is on the horizon. The researchers suggest that introduction of special robots to the emptying fields can help replace farmers. Development of these machines is in full swing.

It is no secret that massive introduction of robots in manufacturing is inhibited not by the imperfection of these machines, but quite another reason. Indeed, robots can easily replace assembly line and construction sites workers, as well as cleaners in offices and in the streets, drivers of public transport, and even traffic wardens. Most human activities are a fixed sequence of very simple actions, and robots are capable of performing these actions.

Replacing people with robots is not happening because it would lead to severe unemployment. If machines dominate in all areas of activity, this would be very difficult to do. Of course, some of the workers who lost they jobs to robots will be able to re-qualify, for example, into technicians engaged in robots repair, but only few of them will be in demand.  

However, one area where robots would not cause any problems is agriculture. Now the number of people producing food is rapidly declining. This process is particularly obvious in Europe, North and South America, East Asia, and Russia, as increasingly more farmers are moving to cities. As a result, the volume of food production is reduced, and it has to be imported.

The idea of ​​"smart" technology for farming is not new. In Europe and America machines are employed in the fields that use GPS and "talk" to plows and water sprinklers. For example, a weeding tool can "tell" a tractor that it is going too fast, or ask it to take a left. Not that long ago, an American corporation John Deere developed a harvester that at the right moment signals its tractor to unload grain. A German company released a pair of Fendt tractors where the first tractor is controlled manually, and the other one automatically repeats the action of the first one, which reduces the time a farmer spends in the field by half.

Read more: Robots to feed entire mankind - English pravda.ru

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