Crop monitoring "agribot" could revolutionise farming sector

Weighing just over 10 kg, the university’s TerraSentia robot is able to travel autonomously between crop rows using a variety of sensors to measure the traits of individual plants and transmitting the data in real time to an operator's phone or computer. The team behind the robot are also developing algorithms to "teach" it to detect and identify common diseases, and measure traits such as plant and corn ear height, leaf area index and biomass.

"These robots will fundamentally change the way people are collecting and utilising data from their fields," claimed project leader, Professor Girish Chowdhary.

University of Illinois plant biology specialist Prof Carl Bernacchi added that automating data collection and analytics has the potential to improve the breeding pipeline by unlocking the mysteries of why plant varieties respond in very different ways to environmental conditions.  Data collected by the crop-scouting robot could help plant breeders identify the genetic lineages likely to produce the best quality and highest yields in specific locations, he said.