Technology
Making Plants Talk! Artificial intelligence and Robotics to Revolutionize Floriculture — Prabha K and K V Prasad ICAR-Directorate of Floricultural Research, Pune
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hat if plants could talk? A grower’s job will be reduced to half if plants would be able to express what they want and could manage their requirement by themselves. With the help of machine learning, artificial intelligence and mechatronics this scenario is getting realized. Plant can sense its own requirements through sensors and send information to the owner or can meet its requirement by itself through robotic
arms and other algorithms to control its environment. When it is attacked by a pest or disease it can raise alarm to caution other plants and take measures to control the pest. Here few such technologies which are revolutionizing or going to revolutionize floriculture are discussed. Intelligent Gardening When googles, alexas, sofias, internet of things etc, are revolutionizing our day-today tasks, agriculture in turn
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Artificial intelligence has put its mark to improve the marketing aspect of agriculture produce as well. Niti Aayog of Government of India has linked up with IBM for advanced predictions in crop loss
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Floriculture Today May 2019
floriculture is no exception. Scientists from Massachusetts Institute of Technology has designed and implemented “Indoor Robot Gardening”. This indoor garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of doing every garden activity from locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruits. The plants in the study were potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e.g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. Like indoor, outdoor robots are also plenty to perform various farm tasks. In the TrimBot2020 project in Europe they designed the first outdoor robot for automatic bush trimming
and rose pruning. Automatic tractors and lawn mowers are a great success long before itself. Similarly, automated unmanned vehicles for agriculture are getting more popular day by day. ‘Green-thumb’ robots are used for automatic planting or harvesting. This robot also notes the surrounding environmental conditions of the plant like temperature, moisture and humidity so that the robot will decide about health of plant and will display it on the LCD. The robot also has watering mechanism it will provide water to the plants according to their requirement by observing soil moisture and humidity. It also detects the plant disease and provides the necessary pesticide according to the type of disease. Ecobot II is energetically autonomous robot which get all of their on board power from microbial
