“The Roomba of the Cornfield”

Three brothers in Minnesota are betting that robots could compete with machines on the farm, too: the huge, and often inefficient, fertilizer applicators made by John Deere and the like. The brothers' Rowbot, in comparison, is so small it can move between rows of crops and fertilize plants one at a time.

The hope is that the Rowbot would in the long run save farmers money on fertilizer, he says, but it could also prevent the kind of pollution of waterways that's rampant in the Midwest.

NPR