Crop counting robot: A much-needed technology for crop breeders

We cannot deny that the food demand is increasing globally and the production needs to be accelerated. The crop breeders have the huge responsibility on their shoulders to yield crops that can withstand weather and climate changes. It is difficult to inculcate technology in the field of agriculture. “The lack of automation for measuring plant traits is a bottleneck to progress”, said Erkan Kayacan, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It is hard to design a robotic system that can monitor and count the crops on its own.

Keeping the challenges in mind, the University of Illinois has developed TerraSentia, a transportable, compact and autonomous robot that can count the crops in the field. This 13-inch wide, 24-pound robot can capture each plant from top to bottom. It uses sensors, cameras, and deep learning algorithms to capture the images and then count the crops using those images.

As the major challenge is that plants aren’t equally spaced, hence they have to adjust camera motion according to the changing inter-plant spacing. This enables the robot to count plants in different fields, with different spacing.

This innovative project is also supported by the Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The robot is available in the market through the startup company, EarthSense, Inc.  It has even earned the best systems paper award at Robotics.