Author(s)
Type of Resource
Article
Description
ROCONA, Inc. (formerly known as Vision Agribotics) is working in conjunction with a large California based agribusiness to develop support technologies that would improve the efficiencies of agriculture. It was founded with the unique notion of working toward improving human life by supplying all of the world's people with ready access to healthy, fresh, affordable food. Hydroponic agriculture on a large scale is a very labor intensive enterprise. Many of the jobs involved are dangerous, dull and dirty. ROCONA's role in this enterprise is to develop a versatile, intelligent un-manned orchard farm tractor so that its farm workers can focus on the high-quality, cognitive work and leave the repetitive, dirty jobs to the robot. This project is a continuation of last year's successful Vision Agrobotics SCOPE project. It will entail completing, delivering and field testing the 2005 tractor to an orchard in California focused on an orchard spraying mission, and building a second 2006 tractor with a multi-use payload bay and a sophisticated sensor module for an orchard health monitoring mission. The "productized" version of this tractor (most probably done by the 2007 SCOPE team to follow) will become a critical enabling part of the exportable "peace through abundant food" pilot farms of the future.
Date Published
2017-10-31 17:54:55