Matt Simon Melanie Ruiz
Science

Are These Robots the Future of Farms?

Soon enough, agriculture might need a lot more bots.
  • 01
    The systems at Iron Ox, an indoor “farm” in Silicon Valley, is so radically different from the past 10,000 years of agriculture that it may as well be happening on Mars.
  • 02
    Indoor farming’s great promise is that it can help grow food using a fraction of the resources and chemicals conventional farming demands—and improve distribution logistics as well.
  • 03
    Today, a head of lettuce travels an average of 2,000 miles from farm to grocery store. The goal at Iron Ox is to set up these greenhouses locally, so food can be harvested and delivered on the same day. And Iron Ox’s system could eventually lead to fully autonomous greenhouse farms.
  • 04
    First, the baby plants must take root in these hydroponic grow modules. Robots aren’t dexterous enough yet for such fine-scale work, so a human has to drop the plants in where their roots can dangle in nutrient-rich water.
  • 05
    Next come the robots. This mobile robot moves throughout the greenhouse, moving the hydroponic grow modules to the processing area. Its omni-directional wheels allow the whole robot to move in any direction.
  • 06
    Plants grown in a field need to be spaced far enough apart to give them room to grow. In this greenhouse, Iron Ox’s system will use grow modules with different spacings for each life stage.
  • 07
    What do you use when it’s time to transplant the crops from one module to another? A robotic arm, of course.
  • 08
    It’s equipped with stereo cameras that allow it to build a 3D image of each plant—which can be used to diagnose a lot of problems.
  • 09
    Is it the size it should be? Is it the shape as expected? Are there any discolorations or spots on the leaves? Abnormalities could indicate lighting or oxygenation problems.
  • 10
    The images run through a neural network that detects agricultural scourges like mildew. The computer can figure out very early on if a plant has mildew—then one of the humans can decide to toss it out before it spreads to others.
  • 11
    At Iron Ox, they’re even teaching the robots to make decisions themselves by showing them examples of good lettuce and bad lettuce. Over time, the robot will learn how to distinguish good from bad by itself.
  • 12
    While greenhouses have been around for decades, they haven’t been efficient enough to be deployed at scale. Since there are no tractors or machines that speed up the process, it costs about twice as much to grow a head of lettuce in a greenhouse as on an outdoor farm.
  • 13
    Now, at Iron Ox, robots can help with that grunt work. Humans still make the decisions, but this kind of automation can bring the greenhouse production costs down.
  • 14
    And with agriculture in America facing a serious labor shortage, those robots are going to become indispensable sooner than we think.
Matt Simon was a senior staff writer covering biology, robotics, and the environment. He’s the author, most recently, of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. ... Read More
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