For one thing, you'd need to regularly walk up and down all those rows of vines, continuously stopping to check on the plants themselves and their grapes. It's the sort of thing that it would be nice if a robot could do. A robot like the VineRobot.

The robot is currently being developed through the European Union VineRobot project. Led by Spain's Universidad de La Rioja, the project involves eight partner groups from the wine-making countries of France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

The idea is that the solar-powered VineRobot will move autonomously on its four wheels, using RGB stereoscopic machine vision and GPS to navigate its way up and down the rows of the vineyard.