Dave wrote in with his intriguing agriculture robot. Are a swarm of robots like this the future of farming?
Prospero is the working prototype of an Autonomous Micro Planter (AMP) that uses a combination of swarm and game theory and is the first of four steps. It is meant to be deployed as a group or “swarm”. The other three steps involve autonomous robots that tend the crops, harvest them, and finally one robot that can plant, tend, and harvest–autonomously transitioning from one phase to another.
These can be used to tend to giant orbiting stations with the last remaining forests . . . until budget cuts force the main forester to kill his partners and send the stations out into space.