Interesting Link: a website which catalogs agricultural robots by task and crop
I was curious what "farming robots" actually look like, so I googled "all farming robots list," followed a couple links, and here we are. There is a website which aims to catalog all the robots you could possibly get for your farm and break them down by task and crop:
I wanted to see a site like this because I was curious about what "automated farming" actually looked like. It turns out, it looks like a wheely box that rolls around doing image recognition on leaves and slapping or drilling the shit out of weeds. This website has a Youtube channel where you can hear its Dutch creator presenting various types of robot.
Like many modern tech products, a great deal of these robots seem subscription-based. On his YouTube channel, the owner of the site generally presents the feature of "our remote techs will call into your robot and help if it starts harvesting wrong or whatever" as a positive, but I imagine that some might consider it an ambiguous benefit. There is even a robot which is called Farming Revolution Weeding-as-a-Service. Right-to-repair movements in the US owe a lot to farmers who don't actually want an ongoing, extractive financial relationship with the manufacturer of their machinery, so I'm curious what they think about stuff like this.
The industrial design of these robots is also fascinating to me. Some of them look like a cross between a tank and a spaceship, while others look more like a bunch of equipment bolted to a metal framework. I'm curious which style farmers prefer - futuristic tractor, or Mars rover?
The guy operating this website is apparently a LinkedIn agriculture robot influencer? His company also offers "specialist business services," which means nothing to me, but probably means something specific to people who are looking to sell an agriculture robot. Apparently he named the site "ducksize" because he hopes that agricultural robots will eventually become the size of an actual duck. Making the robots smaller seems to be really important to this guy, but many of the robots he is actually covering seem pretty fucking gigantic. Maybe his business services are about making the robots smaller??? I imagine that this whole site looks less quaint and strange to someone who is actually in this business, but to me it's a little baffling.
Anyway, I had a question, and now I know the answer. There are thirteen different robots I could be using to farm sugar beets and most of them look like a post from r/low_poly.