G'day, robots! We visit the largest civilian field robotics and intelligent systems group in the world, the Australian Centre for Field Robotics at Sydney University, to see what autonomous machines can do to make people's lives easier, and what the future holds.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Professor Sukkarieh is leading the ACFR's robotic aircraft project. They are targeting invasive species. Not aliens, but other undesirable life forms like weeds, feral animals and locusts. A series of rotary and fixed-wing 'helicopter-based UAVs' track and detect, and the information is logged on large-scale regional maps. Targeted applications and algorithms can learn the characteristics of certain types of weed, detect them and then aerially auto-spray them.