A plant buggy by Google’s parent company

With technology in our lives everywhere, we are moving into the field of computational agriculture. Google's parent company, Alphabet, has unveiled prototype robots that can inspect individual plants in a field.

Alphabet's X company’s project Mineral creates world-changing technology from radical "moonshot" ideas. “Mineral”, a suite of hardware and software tools that analyze the “complexity of the plant world”, said the project lead Elliot Grant.

The robot buggies roll through fields on upright pillars, so they can coast over plants without disturbing them. The goal is to collect huge amounts of data about how crops grow. The US-based company developed a low-emission electric powered plant buggy fitted with solar panels that can roll through the fields, scanning crops and collecting high-quality images of each plant. The images are combined with satellite imagery, weather data, and soil information to get a clear picture of the happenings in the field.

The buggy collects plant-level data, sensing and software tools to collect and interpret diverse data from the field. "Just as the microscope led to a transformation in how diseases are detected and managed, we hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown", Alphabet said in a statement.

The company believes in the new tool collecting important data from the field, like plant height, leaf area & fruit size which can help farmers predict the size and the yield of their crop. They used machine learning to spot patterns about how plants grow and interact with their environment. The buggy comes in different shapes and sizes. They use GPS to identify, and locate plants and analyse plant traits.

Mineral is hoping that its tools will enable us to predict how plants respond to different environments and how to better predict the yield of a crop by tracking plant growth. The objective of this project is to address the methods of growing food sustainably.