“We wanted to do something that, while a world-first, wouldn’t be totally alien to a typical farmer,” researcher Jonathan Gill tells me as we walk through the huge garage at Harper Adams University. There are dozens of people working on various machines across the floor space, but what has become the ‘talk of the town’ sits tucked away in a corner – the Hands-Free Hectare (HFH) fleet.
“The name is pretty self-explanatory,” Jonathan says, “the goal is to produce a crop from start to finish without having a human physically enter the field. We’re doing so with robots and autonomous adaptations to existing machinery.”
A crop of spring barley has been successfully established on the HFH site, an area which has become known as the “amphitheatre of agriculture” across campus.
To date, three separate machines have been used – an Iseki tractor adapted to be controlled remotely, a drone with specialised cameras for measuring important cropping variables and a small scouting robot used for collecting physical samples from the crop to determine health and growth stage.
“We sprayed off the HFH at the beginning of April and the barley was drilled successfully on 25 April and it’s since been rolled, gotten it’s T1 and herbicide sprays and we’re going with PGR and micronutrient sprays tonight.
"We actually missed our pre-emergence spray as it was too windy out,” says Martin Abell, a graduate from the university who now works with Precision Decisions Ltd, Harper Adams’ affiliates in the project.
While the scouting robot – adapted from an electric wheelchair base – resembles something from the television series Robot Wars, the tractor is merely a conventional model with some subtle adaptions to the controls.
“Our goal was not to build robots from scratch and produce a crop; it was simply to produce a crop autonomously. It would take years and multiple projects to come up with the perfect autonomous robots for this job.
"As an industry, we are closer than you think to autonomous cropping. The technology has been there for years. It just needed someone to have a go – that’s what we’re doing,” Jonathan said.
“Safety is an obvious pothole for a company looking to do something like this. From our point of view safety is vital, obviously, but we are focused on producing the crop successfully. Companies like Google, Amazon and Tesla are working on perfecting safety with autonomous vehicles in public settings – we’ll let them figure it out and we can adapt their technologies if it goes that far.”
The tractor has a laser mounted on its bonnet which automatically shuts down the engine should an object enter its patch. There are also multiple kill-switches on the body of the tractor.
While the machines (drone and tractor) can be remote controlled manually, all of the actual field work is autonomous. A ‘mission’ is uploaded by the team and the machines are let do their thing.
“We are hoping for harvest at the end of August,” Martin told me.“The combine is here and we’re adapting it in the same way as the tractor.
"It’s smaller than a conventional combine, having been used for cutting research plots in the past. While there are more functions to worry about compared with the tractor, we’re confident it’ll work OK.”
While he acknowledges that the crop is doing well according to his aerial surveys, Jonathan admits the yield is his main concern.
“Of course, we want to get a good yield at the end of it all – it would make a great story. My surveys and the scouting robot’s expeditions show a thriving crop and a visiting agronomist even looked over the fence and said that he was impressed, but you just don’t know until it’s harvested.”
Kit Franklin, agricultural engineering lecturer at Harper Adams and project lead, gave his two cents on the project’s significance at an event earlier this year.
“Although the system sounds very technical at the moment, and a lot of work has gone into making it work, we do hope that in the future systems based on this concept will exist. They’ll be easy enough for a farmer to use by simply inputting what they require in their computer and the robotic vehicles will go off and do it.
“I believe that farmers will be able to concentrate on agronomic and business decisions, whilst overseeing and managing a number of smaller automated machines; instead of sitting in a large tractor with 300 plus horsepower driving up and down the field.
“In order to achieve this, there’ll be a vast opportunity for careers in the agricultural engineering sector which will be very rewarding and exciting. Those people will be changing agricultural machinery as we currently know it.”
The HFH project is funded by Innovate UK. Follow the project’s progress on Twitter.