Let robot gardener do the chores

Press, 19 February 1988, Page 14

Let robot gardener do the chores

By

SUSAN WOODS

Do you find gardening a back breaking, time consuming job? Don’t worry. Ten years from now you’ll be able to hand over to a robot.

Linked to your garden or household computer, it will look like a cross between a filing cabinet and a set of traffic lights. Dutifully, it will stay in your garden shed all winter. But when the weather gets warmer, out it will come to survey the gardening scene. If the programme is right, then it will reach for the digging arm and set to work turn-

ing over the dormant soil. And then, subject to the right programming, the seeds will be sown with mathematical precision while the robot considers the next action.

Don’t worry about weeds. They will kept down by lethal doses of microwave radiation from your garden shed. From information held by the robot, your flowers and vegetables will be encouraged with harmless X-rays. Scientists have taken over the garden as never before. Australia’s Deakin

University gets up-to-the-minute data and information from specialist scientific gardening centres everywhere. Says scientist in charge, Dr Tom Menzies: Four us, everything in the garden really is lovely. We have the information, and the technology to make the age-old dream of gardening from an arm chair come positively and amazingly true. “Currently we are well

ahead with a robot-build-ing programme. These devices will fight nettles, dandelions, twitch grass and a host of other nasties that are the banes of the gardener’s life. “Microwave radiation,” he explains, "burns weeds away. But with the correct dose it’s possible to leave crops unharmed. “Basically,” he says, “we looked at the robots that build cars and just worked logically down-

wards with the gardener in mind. Given the right programming, the attachments for the various garden tasks, plus the materials such as pesticides, seeds, fertilisers etc., and scientifically, there’s no need for the keen gardener to set foot inside his plot, except to admire what planning and expertise has done for him.”

A sophisticated com-puter-controlled garden robot linked to a network of electronic eyes dotted around the garden comes .from Japan.

At the end of each row of vegetables is a sensor fitted with a miniature camera similar to those used in stores to spot shoplifters. It checks on the soil condition, whether too dry or too wet, and whether in need of fertiliser. It also has the ability to check on what necessary nutrients are missing from the soil. If more water is needed, then the message flashes to the robot which dutifully applies the required amount. The sensors also report whether there is blackfly

on the beans, caterpillars on the cabbages, or white fly on the lettuce. And if action is needed, then out goes the robot suitably equipped. The robot’s sensors also note any cold air that may be slowing the growth of strawberries, or other fruit, and retarding progress in the flower beds. From this information, the computer issues advice on how to bring an ailing garden up to its full growing ability. —Copyright Duo