A team of robots sharing watering and harvesting tasks. Photo from MIT.

An autonomous gardener robot that uses sensors and computers to water, fertilize and harvest fruits and vegetables is under development by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) students of computer science and artificial intelligence labs (CSAIL).

While the long-term goal of this specific research project is to develop such automation for greenhouses, imagine the uses for monitoring fields of grain. This type of precision agriculture system would deliver the right amount of water and nutrients exactly when needed, as well as harvest at the perfect time.

I wrote an in-depth piece about this wild world of robotics in agriculture, which you can read about in an upcoming issue of Successful Farming magazine–which we’ll showcase here on Precision.AgWired.com, too.