Sizzling Japan summers push farmers into AI robot age | NHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS

Extreme summer heat is rewriting the daily reality of Japanese farming, and NHK WORLD-JAPAN reports on the robots moving in to take over. In Fukaya, Saitama Prefecture, a startup called Legmin runs an AI-driven, remote-operated field robot through green onion beds: its cameras and AI read the green mass ahead as crop, steering itself between rows without crushing plants while it sprays pesticide. One operator now does the job from the shaded cab of a truck, replacing the two-person crew that used to haul a 30-kilogram, 110-metre hose through the heat, at roughly the same cost. The second half of the report is stranger and more impressive: at the Smart AgroCenter of Nippon Institute of Technology in Miyashiro, Saitama, a four-legged robotic dog and a drone work as a pollination team, because rising temperatures have made bees sluggish. The quadruped uses a 3D camera and AI to find tomato flowers ready for pollination and passes their coordinates to the drone, which flies over and vibrates against the blossom to mimic a bee. Trials set fruit on about 80% of targeted flowers, matching natural pollination, with field deployment hoped for within the next few years. Behind both projects sits Japan's stated goal of putting smart farming technology on half of its farmland by 2030, driven as much by a shrinking, ageing workforce as by the weather. A clear-eyed, real-world look at agricultural robotics that is already earning its keep in actual fields rather than on a launch stage. By: NHK WORLD-JAPAN, published on September 28, 2026.