BlackBird robotic camera uses AI to protect grape crops

Biologist Lance Cadle-Davidson, an adjunct professor in the School of Integrative Plant Science (SIPS) at Cornell University and a research plant pathologist with the US Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS), is working to develop grape varieties that are more resistant to powdery mildew, which can show up in infrared before they are visible to the naked eye. His lab’s research is hindered by the need to manually assess thousands of grape leaf samples for evidence of infection.

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To overcome this bottleneck, Cadle-Davidson’s team developed prototypes of imaging robots that could automatically perform high-throughput phenotyping through the USDA-ARS funded VitisGen2 grape breeding project and in partnership with the Light and Health Research Center at  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. This partnership led to the creation of the BlackBird robotic camera.

According to Cornell the BlackBird robot can gather information at a scale of 1.2 micrometres per pixel and for each 1cm leaf sample being examined, the robot provides 8,000 by 5,000 pixels of information.