Circa 2018
Californian robotics company Iron Ox claims to be ‘reinventing farming from the ground up’, as it unveils an autonomous indoor farm that leverages the latest advancements in arable science, machine learning, and robotics.
Indoor farms see harvesting, seeding and plant inspections occur thousands of times a day – tasks perfectly suited to robots. Iron Ox is using the latest in machine learning and computer vision to enable its robots to respond to the needs of individual plants.
The farm is now in full production, thanks to its two key proprietary robotics systems – a robotic arm and a mobile transport. They work cohesively, with the latter using sensors and computer vision technology more typically seen in a self-driving car. The robotic arm, meanwhile, can analyse each plant at sub-millimetre scale.