Many Tsvetkov plants to transfer pollen from one flower to another require the help of animal pollinators and most of these insects. While the largest group of pollinators, flowers are considered as the bee population which in recent years has been shrinking in the United States, for example, for the 2014-2015 season the population of bees has declined by 42 percent, what worries both scientists and farmers. Alternatively, the natural process of pollination, you can use robots, because for other tasks in agriculture, wheeled and flying robots are already successfully used. However, they are typically used either for monitoring of crops or for pollination, and rarely for multiple tasks at once.

Patents Walmart, the world's largest online retailer, last year it was discovered six different applications that describe various scenarios of the use of drones in agriculture, among which mention cross-pollination of plants and protection of crops by spot spraying drone will see the plant is suffering from pests, and process it. It is assumed that the thus reduced load on the environment, and farmers would spend less money on pesticides.

According to Reuters, likely, Walmart received the patents for the optimization and standardization of the process of growing crops by farmers. In the future, the network of stores may, for example, cooperate only with those farmers who will supply produce grown in accordance with the technology patented by the company. It should be noted that patents are not always implemented even at the level of prototypes, so to date it is unclear whether Walmart actually implement such agronomic decisions.

The pollination with the help of robots yet that only works in science fiction, but developments in this direction are carried out in practice. In the US, for example, are developing a robotic pollinator on a wheeled platform, and the Japanese have already begun to experience the drone pollinator.

Photo: Lima Pix / flickr

Source: https://nplus1.ru/