Startup Testing Mobile Farmbots 243
An anonymous reader writes "Wired reports on Harvest Automation, a Massachusetts company developing small robots that can perform basic agricultural labor. The ones currently being tested in greenhouses and plant nurseries are 'knee-high, wheeled machines.' 'Each robot has a gripper for grasping pots, a deck for carrying pots, and an array of sensors to keep track of where it is and what's around it. Teams of robots zip around nursery fields, single-mindedly spacing and grouping plants. Key to making the robots flexible and cost-effective is designing them to work only with information provided by their sensors. They don't construct a global map of their environment, and they don't use GPS. The robots have sensors that detect boundary markers, a laser range finder to detect objects in front of them, and a gyroscope for navigating by dead reckoning. The robots determine how far they've traveled by keeping track of wheel rotations.'"
Re:If these have the impact of the "cotton gin"... (Score:5, Informative)
From my hazy recollection of American history, the cotton (en)gin(e), made it possible to process cotton with a lot less labor making slaves less necessary(?) and set the stage for the civil war. Or something like that.
The general idea of your post may be correct, but I think it's the opposite. The cotton gin made slaves more necessary to the south (or at least so they believed) because it made seed-heavy cotton varieties into a viable crop. This cotton would grow well where other crops didn't. Without the gin, the plant wouldn't have been economical and slavery would have continued to gradually fade. Some of this is conjecture, it's hard to speculate accurately on possible alternative paths of history, but slavery was supposedly declining before the cotton gin was made available.
Picture with their handler (Score:5, Informative)