Farming drones aren’t all airborne. I guess the ones driving around on the ground might be called robots though? At least in English.
I imagine that the main reason these ones fly is because you can’t drive around a rice field as you mention. Here in Denmark though most drone tech aimed at farming drives around. Flying drones are mostly used for surveillance, to see which areas need to be watered and such.
As far as repairs go, drones aren’t that bad in comparison to a lot of other farm equipment. This is because farmers can 3D print almost every part of a drone. Of course some manufacturers are going to struggle with this, and this is actually one of the major reasons keeping farming tech “slow” since a lot of the actually sellable solutions are build by startups which John D and his friends struggle to figure out how to make money of something that’s cheap and easy to repair.
Anyway, farming drones is probably the most interesting field of technology you can work in right now. At least in my opinion.
As far as the etymology goes, back in the days a drone was a male bee, so by default airborne. You can trace that meaning back two thousand years or so. It was first used to mean remote controlled aircraft in 1946.
Of course, languages evolve and now it can mean any untethered robot; air, land or sea.
A lot of the farming that is happening in Vietnam is on these smaller scale farmer levels. Drones are a harder sell in America imo because you have large multi-hundred/thousand acre farms in a country optimized for cars. In Vietnam the farmer will have a much much smaller plot of land and in the countryside often the roads will look more like sidewalks to a westerner.
I am not sure how effectively you could move tractors around in the countryside and you would be doing it often with the size of these farms.
The overwhelming majority of the rice comes from the Mekong and Red River Deltas which are, like all deltas, extremely flat.
As you can imagine rice paddies are a bastard for wheels, because its muddy as fuck. Its not like its economical to put a cement pan underneath as some rice plants have >1m roots[1] so you can't treat it like watercress (thats a wild assertion, maybe you can)
Also, the banks that hold the water to make it a paddy are unlikely to be regular or load bearing. Moreover, the fields are not laid out with a road to link them all together.
So conventional tractor with thin wheels/floaters just won't work. And smaller vehicles are just impractically heavy or impossible to get into most fields.
As for the AI shit, I don't think there is acutally that much. It looks a lot like its just standard drone mapping/possible machine vision to detect the state of the crops/border of the field.
Would this scale up for western style large fields? no. but for small irregular terrace style fieldlets, it would