Robotics: Six presenting firms offer robotic and software systems to maximize yield and productivity including Energid Technologies that has developed a robotic citrus harvesting system that automatically finds and removes fruit at a lower cost than manual harvesting, and Vision Robotics that will use stereo vision-based robots to pick, prune and other tasks on specialty crops.

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Vision Robotics, a company based in San Diego, has demonstrated a prototype vine-pruning robot.

ECONOMIST: Agricultural robots

It should be able to prune vines at about half the cost of manual labour, says Derek Morikawa, the chief executive of Vision Robotics.

ECONOMIST: Agricultural robots

Singer is a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution whose book, "Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, " projected a vision of the future of war that developers were seeking.

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And we think that it won't be until robots are truly accessible -- 14-year-olds hacking on Wi-Fi-connected, computer-vision-capable robots in their garages on the weekends -- that innovation in robotics will really take off in earnest.

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