Google Robots
One of the world’s largest tech companies is going into the farming business, as Google has unleashed prototype robots designed to inspect plants in a field.
The Google-bots roll through fields on tall, upright pillars, so they can coast over plants without damaging the crop, collecting massive amounts of data as they go.
The robots are part of Project Mineral from X Company, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. X Company was formed for the purposes of cutting edge research into what Alphabet calls ‘moonshot ideas’, creating world-changing technology for the world’s greatest problems.
Project lead Elliott Grant says his team is literally working to transform how food is grown at a global scale.
"We hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown".
The team says its main goal is to address the world's increasing need for food and the sustainability of growing it.
But current tools do not give farmers the kind of information they need.
"What if every single plant could be monitored and given exactly the nutrition it needed?" Grant asks.
"What if we could untangle the genetic and environmental drivers of crop yield?”
The ‘plant buggys’ are designed to give farmers information about their crops at an almost unimaginably detailed level, says X Company. "Over the past few years, the plant buggy has trundled through strawberry fields in California and soybean fields in Illinois, gathering high-quality images of each plant, and counting and classifying every berry and every bean," it said.
The robots can report back on individual plant height, leaf area, fruit size, the presence of pest insects or disease, and overall plant health, allowing farmers to adjust quickly to threats.
