Agricultural

When it comes to targets for autonomous machinery, those carrying out repetitive tasks on farmland are ripe for the picking. The newly introduced Monarch Tractor is designed to show how it’s done, packing an all-electric powertrain and machine learning.

​They’re almost cute, these little seatless quadbikes, and they can be programmed to perform a bunch of handy tasks outdoors. Honda has been testing them in search and rescue, firefighting, construction, agriculture, landscaping and snow removal applications.

Our drones are pretty handy, but nature’s drones – bees – are far more efficient. Rather than building our own from scratch, researchers at the University of Washington have created tiny suites of sensors that bees can wear like backpacks, to help gather data from their environment.