Nigerian Agriculture : Introducing Agricultural Robotics Technology to Nigerian Agriculture - Chapter one

INTRODUCTION

One of the fastest growing engineering fields of today is Robotics. Millions of dollars have been spent in the development of robots to be used in all sources of fields. The use of robots is more common today than ever before and it is no longer exclusively used by the heavy productive industries. (Mocks, 2007)

Robots are essentially designed to remove the human factors from labour intensive or dangerous work.
The computer is the main brain of the robot, which receives data from various sources to control the movement of the robot in other to accomplish the assigned task.

APPLICATION OF ROBOTICS TECHNOLOGY IN NIGERIAN AGRICULTURE.

The idea of applying robotics technology in agriculture is very new. The main area of application of robot is the harvesting stage.
Generally, The agricultural industry is behind other industries in using robots because the sort of jobs involve in agriculture are not straight forward and many repetitive tasks are not the same every time.

Nigeria is a the most populated black country in the african continent but yet depends on other countries to feed her.

Most developed countries have deployed agricultural robots in their agricultural production processes to efficiently and effectively improve their produce . With the surplus production of food they can export to other countries for trade.

Nigeria depends on these nations produce to feed her population. Very sad indeed.
Nigeria is blessed with good soil for agricultural production. That has the potential of producing food that will feed her and the entirety of african continent.

But we are bent on subsistence farming which mainly involves drudgery and manual labour. But we can improve our produce if and only if we deploy agbots under the umbrella of mechanized farming , then we will have a robust agricultural production to feed ourselves and africa at large.

AGRICULTURAL ROBOTICS DESIGN

Mechanically, the agricultural robotics design consists of the gripper , manipulator and the end effector. The design of the manipulator consist of the motions, economic efficiency and task. The device found at the end of the agricultural robotics arm is the end effector, which is used for varieties of agricultural operations .

IMPORTANCE OF AGRICULTURAL ROBOTS (AGBOTS)

• The habits protects the human workers from potential harmful effects chemicals through spraying .

• The habits reduces production cost, improve quality produce and less need for manual labour.

• The agbots performs agricultural operations autonomously such as fruit picking, spraying and the mechanical weed control ,precission and efficiency increase.

• The agbots do not get tired and they do not need rest , they rarely make errors and offer high speed to do work.

DOWNSIDE OF AGRICULTURAL ROBOTS (AGBOTS)

• Agbots are expensive to purchase or produce.

• The cost of maintenance is very high .

• With the presence of agbots there will be less need for workforce which will result to farmers loosing their jobs.

AGRICULTURAL ROBOTS (AGBOTS)

• The Oracle robot
• Milking robot
• Treebot robot
• Forest robot
• The fruit picking robot
• The flying micro robot
• Strawberry picking robot
• Demeter robot (the robot farmer)
• The hortibot robot
• The agrobot robot
• The planter robot
• The crop scout robot
• The shear magic robot
• Field furrow robot
• Grafting robot
• LSU's revolutionary agbot robot
• autonomous robotic tractor
• Lettues bot robot
• Chicken deboring robot
• Robots bees robot

In the next chapter I will be explaining extensively the uses of the above mentioned agbots and their application in the nigerian agricultural production processes.

All images are from getty images

REFERENCES

• Ref 1
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• Ref 5

MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emmanuel Nonso Israel a. k. a @masterwriter is a Nigerian. He is an Agricultural and Bio Environmental Engineer by profession. He holds a B. Eng Degree and currently pursuing his M. SC all from the prestigious Federal University of Technology Owerri. He is single and has flair for Robotics.

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