Robotics and USDA: $3 Million to Develop Robots to Work in Agriculture and Other Areas

So, the USDA has a thing called the National Robotics Initiative. It has shown its seriousness by launching a grant competition -- $3 million will go to create agricultural advances led by robots.

The initiative is backed by several other governmental departments, too: NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Health, Department of Energy and others.

This is probably happening because robotics are not new to agriculture and have included a robot that can gather sheep like a border collie; one that can sort out grapes (two tons) in 12 minutes; and another one that can differentiate good lettuce leaves from weeds and get the lettuce, as the magazine Modern Farmer reported.

The USDA announced the grants a few days ago, and included some recent examples of winning applicants. These were:

• A project at University of California Davis received $1,069,598 to develop technological and theoretical tools to enable design, optimization, prototyping and field-testing of mechanized harvesting systems for orchards.

• A University of Minnesota St. Paul project earned $914,565 to create planning algorithms for robots in which they operate autonomously in places like apple orchards so that Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) robot systems will function there in automation tasks that involve specialty crops.

• A project at University of Pennsylvania that received $556,726 will implement Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating with human scouts to study solutions for farmers of specialty crops. The idea here is to improve the ways that farmers can gain timely estimates of yields, learn about crop stress and find pests.

If you'd like to apply, do so by March 7 at the USDA site. 

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