Over the last few days I’ve been mesmerized more than once by a video from Japan showing a little white robot swimming through rice fields.
The Nissan engineer who designed it was trying to make a robot that worked like a duck.
For the non-rice farmers among us, ducks are useful in rice farming because, as they swim through, they aerate the water and stop weeds from growing.
Their manure is a fertilizer and they eat bugs, all of which means there’s less need to use pesticides and weed-killers.
For those areas that don’t have ducks nearby (maybe because, in true Looney Tunes fashion, they’re busy arguing with rabbits?) there’s the robot, known as Aigamo.
It uses solar power for energy, GPS for navigation, and rotating rubber brushes on its bottom end in place of duck feet.
There are Aigamo tests underway in Japan, and if they go well, I imagine Scrooge McDuck will take some of the gold he keeps in that vault he swims in and invest some of it to make more of his rice-friendly, robotic duck brethren.
If you prefer non-robotic ducks, then you’ve got some options this summer with the World’s Largest Rubber Duck.
It’s 61 feet tall, 68 feet wide and travels around the country, including a stop later this month in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Nissan Builds Robot Duck To Help Rice Farmers Keep Weeds Out Of Their Paddies (Designboom)
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Photo by Kenya via Flickr/Creative Commons
