Tending your garden with am army of robots
15.7 years ago computer, electronics, garden maintenance
I must say gardening and robotics are a couple of non relating interests, well at least until now. Fortunately some smart students at MIT have joined these two areas into one. I am a little skeptical about the real world implementation of this, I guess if production cost was low enough and you had a large enough green house; a little army of plant tending robots would be a cool site to see.
Either way, this a really cool academic project. See the video below for the robots watering and harvesting some tomatoes.
“The idea for the project came from work done by Nikolaus Correll, a postdoctoral assistant working in Professor Daniela Rus’ Distributed Robotics Lab. Correll, who came to CSAIL in 2007, saw the possible applications of swarm robotics to an agricultural environment. In the long view, the researchers hope to develop a fully autonomous greenhouse, complete with robots, pots and plants connected via computation, sensing and communication. Each robot is outfitted with a robotic arm and a watering pump, while the plants themselves are equipped with local soil sensing, networking, and computation. This affords them the ability to communicate: plants can request water or nutrients and keep track of their conditions, including fruit produced; robots are able to minister to their charges, locate and pick a specific tomato, and even pollinate the plants.”
[via MIT via Make via Gizmodo]
Tags: outdoor plants, tomato plants
15.7 years ago
It looks like this is still in a proof of concept stage and is an admirable achievement to get working what they have.However I think that much of what they are using the robots for is duplication of tasks that can be carried out by more permanent fixtures more efficiently, reliable and more cost-effectively. In actuality, the sensor network aspect of the project, while less sci-fi, is perhaps the more valuable development in monitoring and modelling environments.
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