Credit: GEORGIA TECH RESEARCH INSTITUTE
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When it comes to using technology in agriculture, Asia and the U.S. have been increasingly using drones for crop monitoring to help out with farming.
Scientists at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) believe that robots could help in producing food for the increasing world population. Georgia Tech scientists have developed a swinging robot named Tarzan that is inspired by sloths.
Tarzan, the two-armed robot, was made so that it would be able to assist farmers more effectively in monitoring their crops. Like the famously lazy sloth, it suspends while it moves back and forth in a swinging motion. It shoots pictures of plants and sends them back to the farmer to analyze the crop growth.
When it comes to a farm environment, many robots encounter several issues. “They tend to get tangled. They tend to get stuck,” says Jonathan Rogers, a robotics expert at Georgia Tech, “It’s very hard to leave them out for long periods without a human assisting them.”
He further added: “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.”
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