Japan ‘Dream Project’: 600 Acre Farm with Autonomous Robot Workers
January 7th, 2012Does anyone understand how LEDs are supposed to replace pesticides?
Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes.
Anyway, this sounds like it could have been lifted right out of some 1980s era anime film.
Via: AFP:
Japan is planning a futuristic farm where robots do the lifting in an experimental project on land swamped by the March tsunami, the government said Thursday.
Under an agriculture ministry plan, unmanned tractors will work fields where pesticides will have been replaced by LEDs keeping rice, wheat, soybeans, fruit and vegetables safe until robots can put them in boxes.
Carbon dioxide produced by machinery working on the up to 250-hectare (600 acre) site will be channeled back to crops to boost their growth and reduce reliance on chemical fertilizers, the Nikkei newspaper said.
The agricultural ministry will begin on-site research later this year with a plan to spend around four billion yen ($52 million) over the next six years, a ministry official said.
Land in Miyagi prefecture, some 300 kilometres (200 miles) north of Tokyo, which was flooded by seawater on March 11, has been earmarked for the so-called “Dream Project”.
@ Kevin
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2603179/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6366-selfsustaining-killer-robot-creates-a-stink.html
http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn17367-carnivorous-domestic-entertainment-robots/6
many insects that are significant economic pests in greenhouses, including thrips, aphids, and whiteflies use vision as a primary cue to orient to their hosts. Vision cues are predominantly related to color, or more specifically hue, color saturation, and brightness. Most insects studied have green, UV, and blue receptors, though red receptors have been found in some. Color can be used in two ways to protect crop plants, either as a mechanism to attract insects to traps or “decoy” plants, or to repel insects by interrupting the sequence that begins with their orientation to the plant from a distance and ends with establishment on the plant. A new revolution in horticultural lighting is underway with the development of solid-state lighting systems, the first lighting system that allows control of a lamp’s spectral output. During research with plants in controlled environment rooms outfitted with red/blue light emitting diode (LED) arrays it was apparent that plant appearance was radically different than when observed under broad spectrum light sources. This led to the hypothesis that modifying lighting to change the appearance of plants might disrupt the ability of pest insects to locate and attack host plants, or inversely.
http://www.sbir.gov/sbirsearch/detail/8369
Thanks, guys.