Weeding a garden on a rocky slope is a nightmare. Now imagine doing that for a living across hundreds of acres. That’s the reality for farmers growing specialty crops like grapes and blueberries, where traditional wheeled robots can’t handle the tangled, uneven ground.
According to a report in IEEE Spectrum, Ground Control Robotics is addressing this issue with a wild-looking solution: giant, robotic centipedes.
Georgia Tech professor Dan Goldman founded GCR and is tackling this problem, which is as much about money as it is about mud. The cost of weeding strawberries by hand can run a farmer more than $1,000 an acre. It’s a huge expense that can make or break a season.
The solution looks like a giant mechanical bug.
Inspired by the way real centipedes navigate complex terrain, the GCR team designed a long, multi-legged robot that moves in a way that’s almost like swimming through clutter. As the company’s website explains, this “mechanical intelligence” means the robot’s body does the hard work, not a complex computer. It can handle rough terrain, climb over obstacles, and even right itself after a fall, all without high-tech sensors.
The idea was born in a lab focused on how animals move. Goldman told IEEE Spectrum “that’s where we started to see that we could have these robots not just be laboratory toys, but that they could become a minimum viable product.”
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Ground Control isn’t alone in bringing creative tech to agriculture. One startup built a solar-powered robot that zaps weeds on its own. Researchers are also developing robotic bees to help pollinate crops, and another team created a sensing technology that lets farm bots identify fruit by touch.
For farmers, these “bug-bots” mean saving money on labor and reducing the need for chemical sprays. That’s good for them and better for the planet, as it keeps herbicides out of our soil and water. The company is already testing its robots in Georgia, with a future vision of them working in swarms, eventually using jaws or even lasers to keep fields clear.
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