Researchers from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new lightweight, low-cost agricultural robot. The aim of the machine is to help transform data collection and field scouting. Such a device will be of interest to agronomists, seed companies and farmers.
The device is called the TerraSentia crop phenotyping robot. The machine has the capability of measuring the traits of individual plants, via an array of different sensors and cameras. The robot can transmit the collected data in real time to a mobile device ot to a cloud-based platform, providing analytics that allow those in farming or the agribusiness to react to thereby helping to improve crop yields or soil fertility.
TerraSentia weighs just 24 pounds meaning it is so lightweight that it could roll over young plants without any harm to them. The robot is 13 inches wide, which means it is portable and compact. The U.S. Department of Energy provided $3.1 million in funding for the project.
The robot can collect data on different viridiplantae traits, such as plant health, physiology, stress response and others. The robot can also autonomously measures important plant growing markers such as stand-count, stem width, and stem angle, via the fitted visual cameras. For the next phase of development, the machine learning part of the robot will assess parameters like vigor, plant height, corn ear height, leaf area index, biomass, and it should be able to detect and identify crop diseases.
The video below shows the robot in action:
Discussing the importance of the technology, one of the developers, Professor Girish Chowdhary said: “The robots will fundamentally change the way people collect and use data from their fields…It will be transformative for growers to be able to measure every single plant in the field in a short period of time.”
The researcher goes on to explain, in a research note: “Our robot will do the exhausting, time consuming, error-prone part – collecting field data – giving plant breeders and scientists more time to analyze it and make key decisions. What would take a team of researchers tromping through fields with tape measures and other tools to do in several days, our robot can do in several hours.”
For 2018, as part of an early adopter program, the TerraSentia company, a spin-off from the University of Illinois, are manufacturing 30 TerraSentia robots. These will retail at a discounted price of $4,999.
