Would that fly?

Q. Is there a place for robots in nursery production?

A. Robots are becoming viable for nursery production. The once popular vision of robots as “mechanical men” has given way to a more practical view — robots designed for specific tasks, such as iRobot’s popular floor cleaning robot, Roomba, and Kiva Systems’ order-fulfillment robots. Some growers use mechanical robots to perform tasks like unloading containers from their canning machines, but much more versatile robots are coming. The green industry has an ideal job for small mobile robots: handling container-grown plants. Harvest Automation is developing robots that reduce direct manual labor costs while enabling efficiency initiatives for better resource management, just-in-time production and inventory control. Our first robots will be available early in 2012, and are being developed for use with 1-, 2- and 3-gallon containers. They will perform container spacing, and collection and consolidation tasks.

Greg Timbol, Harvest Automation