Noboru Noguchi
Bioproduction Engineering, Research Faculty of Agriculture, Hokkaido University

In Japan, the number of farmers is decreasing and aside from the fact the problem in aging farmers. In the near future, Japan farmers will decrease rapidly that will result to shortage in food production. That is why researchers in Japan are doing a research about robot farming system which is one of the possible solutions to solve the food shortage production. Japanese national government started the R&D project to develop agricultural robots in 2010. The objective of the R&D project is to develop a robot farming system using multiple robots for rice, wheat, and soybean.
In the presentation, current status of a robot farming system using multiple robots and Multi-GNSS will be explained. The robot farming system includes a rice planting robot, a seeding robot, a robot tractor, a combine robot harvester and various implements attached on the robot tractor. One of the key technologies of the robot farming system is Multi-GNSS, particularly, Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS). Major functions of QZSS, such as, increase of GPS availability and performance enhancement, make large contribution on agricultural robot in aspect of increasing accuracy and reliability of real-time positioning. The other important parts of the farming system are a robot management system, robot safety, and real-time monitoring/documentation. The robot farming system will be a great help in the near future in Japan agriculture, because the farming will be fully automated. Also, increase in food production will be one of the great outputs of this system.