Robotics developers say small lightweight weed controllers and fruit harvesters will revolutionise farming and create more jobs.
Sixty of the world's leading robotics engineers and academics have gathered for the first ever Summer School on Agricultural Robotics being held at Sydney University.
"It's a whole new sector of employment," said organiser Dr Robert Fitch, manager of systems planning at the Robotics Centre (ACFR).
Dr Fitch was raised on a small farm in Ohio, US and never dreamed he would talk so fondly of agriculture, but it all changed when he went into robotics.
"We need people to process, analyse, interpret, understand data, to use that data to make better decisions," he said.
"We need people to build robots and write apps for robots.
"The challenge is attracting young people back onto the farm.
"In Australia and around the world we're facing a shortage of farmers. We've lost 40 per cent since the 1980s."
Dr Fitch says Australian farmers are the most innovative in the world, with nearly everyone using automated steering systems with GPS, in cropping.
Six years ago, his centre partnered with a start-up company, SwarmFarm, created by Andrew Bate, a young farmer from Gindie near Emerald in Queensland.
Mr Bate was driven by frustration about falling productivity.
"I had too much time in the tractor cab, and realised that technology that had driven agriculture in the last 30 years had really plateaued," Mr Bate told the conference in Sydney.
"The herbicide resistance in weeds is getting worse, and larger and larger machines are not the best way to grow crops, but they're the best ways to get more productivity out of each man.
"I look at robots as a new opportunity to grow crops in a better way, small lightweight machines that do their job very well."
After partnering three years ago with the Queensland University of Technology to research the robot, Dr Fitch is now up to development.
"We set out to develop better ways to kill weeds, by developing small robot platforms, that are nimble and can slow down to stop and kill every weed, without causing soil compaction," he said.
"We could either pull the weed, laser it, microwave it or target it with weedkiller.
"I see robots as a far bigger picture in agriculture, a new paradigm, where we can throw out all the things that have driven agricultural productivity, and ask 'How can we use these robots to do things differently?'".
Dr Fitch sees machines that might look totally different, that can treat plants down to their individual leaf, rather than do things on large blocks in the paddock.
Mr Bate agrees it doesn't replace labour, but creates jobs in technology.
What it will save is input costs of fossil fuel, fertiliser and herbicides.
"We actually see robots as being simple machines that do simple tasks well. Like the Ford or Holden factory, there's not one robot that builds a whole car, the robots are simple modular machines that can be quite small," Mr Bate said.
"Instead of a large machine that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, we're talking about a number of machines that cost well under a hundred thousand dollars.
"A lot of technology that hasn't been available to a lot of farmers is all of a sudden accessible."
Mr Bate said that, by the end of 2015, SwarmFarm would be trialling commercial operation, although he conceded it would still be some time before farmers could buy a weed-swatting robot.
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