Robot dogs on farms do a lot more than just guarding

Imran Shaikh (0:00)

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Imran Shaikh (1:55)

In this episode, we're talking about robot dogs. They're now on farms, and they do a lot more than just guarding. More on that coming up, but first. It's rare to hear about a repairable smart watch. Google's Pixel Watch 4 is setting a bar, but it's still the exception rather than the rule, especially across the industry. Gear that small and that tightly packaged is hard to make sustainable to the point. Even the EU added a carve out to its e-waste rules. So when Scottish startup Una said it had made a truly modular and user-repairable, smart-ish GPS running watch, we paid attention. Una was founded by Lewis Allison, the former CTO of Scottish golf watch company Shot Scope. He set out to build a watch that was modular, repairable, and open source to enable users to have far more control over their own gear. The company's slogan is One Watch for Life, but it's not charging a premium for the hardware, which costs $199.

Right now, it's clear that modularity brings along with it some compromises, which mean Una won't work for everyone. But as a first step, it gets plenty of praise for all of the things that it gets right. Head over to engadget.com for Daniel Cooper's full review of the Una Watch.

A new technology is cropping up in fields and greenhouses across the globe, robot dogs. The result of explosions in robotic and artificial intelligence technologies, these anthropomorphic rovers have largely made headlines for their use in security details, guarding everything from international borders to the president's Palm Beach Resort. In the agriculture industry, American farmers have begun to deploy the robots to guard high-value crops, where thermal sensing and electro-optical cameras detect threats, record incidents for analysis, and alert staff to issues in real time. And while the idea of AI watchdogs seems straight out of a market paperback dystopia, some developers believe they will be more useful outside of their security teams.

Robot dogs equipped with AI vision models are beginning to fill a substantial hole in farmers' datasets. Previously farmers have had to rely on satellites, drones, and manual inspections to measure crop yields, track high-level trends, and detect diseases. Such methods are somewhat limited, highly resource-intensive, and, in the case of drones, impractical for greenhouse crops. Rovers and other agronomical machinery, meanwhile, lack the dexterity to traverse uneven terrain without damaging crops. In light of these challenges, agronomists have been searching for a means of automating analytical processes that require eyes on the ground. Four-legged robots offer a solution by capturing high-resolution images of crops and sending them through artificial intelligence vision models to create functional datasets for farmers to better understand their crops. Volkswagen, for instance, deployed robotic sheep to study agrovoltaics at its Polish solar farm.