Perhaps it is time for farmers to put their feet up now that robots are used to inspect crops, dig up weeds, and even have become shepherds, too. Commercial growing fields are astronomically huge and take thousands of man-hours to operate. One prime example is one of Australia’s most isolated cattle stations, Suplejack Downs in the Northern Territory, extending across 4,000 square kilometers, taking over 13 hours to reach by car from the nearest major town—Alice Springs.

The extreme isolation of these massive farms leaves them often unattended, and monitored only once or twice a year, which means if the livestock falls ill or requires assistance, it can be a long time for farmers to discover.

However, robots are coming to the rescue.

Robots are currently under a two-year trial in Wales which will train ‘farmbots’ to herd, monitor the health of livestock, and make sure there is enough pasture for them to graze on. The robots are equipped with many sensors to identify conditions of the environment, cattle and food, using thermal and vision sensors that detect changes in body temperature.

“You’ve also got color, texture and shape sensors looking down at the ground to check pasture quality,” says Salah Sukkarieh of the University of Sydney, who will carry out trials on several farms in central New South Wales.

During the trials, the robot algorithms and mechanics will be fine-tuned to make it better suited to ailing livestock and ensure it safely navigates around potential hazards including trees, mud, swamps, and hills.

“We want to improve the quality of animal health and make it easier for farmers to maintain large landscapes where animals roam free,” says Sukkarieh.

The robots are not limited to herding and monitoring livestock. They have been created to count individual fruit, inspect crops, and even pull weeds.

Many robots are equipped with high-tech sensors and complex learning algorithms to avoid injuring humans as they work side by side. The robots also learn the most efficient and safest passages, and allow engineers and farmers to analyze and better optimize the attributes and tasks of the robot, as well as provide a live stream of real-time feedback on exactly what is happening on the farms.

Of course, some worry lies in replacing agricultural workers. However, it is farmers that are pushing for the advancements due to ever-increasing labor vacancies, making it difficult to maintain large-scale operations.

The robots have provided major benefits to farmers in various ways, from hunting and pulling weeds to monitoring the condition of every single fruit. Future farms will likely experience a greater deal of autonomy as robots take up more and more farm work efficiently.

A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by Nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech integrated systems. 【小题1】 Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just the sum of a bunch of individual components,” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. 【小题2】 “The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own,” he said.

They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of inter-dependencies on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it’s connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems.

While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, 【小题3】 “Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around,” he said.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. 【小题4】 “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,”