Robots are likely to play a big role in the future of farming and agriculture. Engineers in Japan have already created a fully autonomous 'robot run' farm, and those already working on farms are adopting self-driving tractors.

Engineers at Georgia Tech University created the two-armed bot to help researchers monitor crops. Tarzan has been designed to hang above a field of crops on a wire and monitor plants as they grow.

"The only way we are going to be able to achieve the level of food production we need in the future is to employ automation and robots," Jonathan Rogers, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at the institute explained.

He said Tarzan was designed to be "out of the way and off the ground". This, the professor says, means it can work without getting in the way of the growing crops or the machinery needed to water and harvest them.

The robot works by holding onto a wire with one arm, with a camera and control system below it, and then swinging along the wire with its other arm. In many ways, the bot replicates the movement of a sloth, or monkey, swinging between trees.

The robot has been dubbed Tarzan as it is the most familiar character to swing through trees from vine to vine but it was designed to replicate the movements of the sloth.

"The sloth is very energy efficient and we've tried to design this robot to be like that too," Rogers said.

He added that between each swing, the robot takes a picture of the crops below and sends them back to the farmer. Algorithms and humans are then able to monitor the quality of the crops.

The university is planning on using Tarzan to help its academics make observations on how different breeds of soybeans grow in the Sun in July. The beans are studied each year at a test field in Athens, Georgia and it is hoped they will help to take more regular measurements of the plants.

"Someday, they may be able to stay at their laptops miles away, in the air conditioning, scanning a steady stream of images and data sent back from the robots," Georgia Tech said.