2019 Spring Farm Outlook

Page 24 2019 Logan County Farm Outlook Magazine Lincoln Daily News March 21, 2019 the study, and see if any action can be taken to improve the crops’ health. Girish Chowdhary, an agricultural engineer at the University of Illinois, says he believes robots in the field will be common place soon, although not in a large-scale sense. Williams writes that “a principle duty of large-farm robotics will be old-fashioned weed control. That is becoming increasingly important with the growth of herbicide-resistant weeds, especially those that are becoming unresponsive to products such as glyphosate.” In an article for Science Daily, Chowdhary adds that there is “a big market for these robots not only in the U.S., where agriculture is a profitable business, but also in developing countries such as Brazil and India, where subsistence farmers struggle with extreme weather conditions such as monsoons and harsh sunlight, along with weeds and pests.” Chowdhary is also leading a team of crop scientists, computer scientists and engineers in developing TerraSentia, a crop phenotyping robot that travels on the ground instead of in the air. The robot was shown off at the 2018 Energy Innovation Summit Technology Showcase in National Harbor, Maryland. The robot analyzes plants using a variety of sensors and cameras, transmitting the data in real time to a customized app and tablet computer that come with it, which allows the operator to steer the robot using virtual reality and GPS. Researchers are currently working on algorithms to “teach” the robot to detect and identify common diseases. Additionally, the goal is to teach it how to identify a variety of traits, including plant size, corn ear height, leaf area index and biomass. “These robots will fundamentally change the way people are collecting and utilizing data from their fields,” says Chowdhary. Plant biology professor Carl Bernacchi, one of the scientists collaborating on the project, is working with data gathered by the robot. “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,” says Bernacchi. Researchers believe that TerraSentia fills “a big gap in the current agricultural equipment market between massive machinery that cultivates or sprays many acres quickly and human workers who can perform tasks requiring precision but move much more slowly.” “A robot or swarm of robots could go into a field and do the same types of things that people are doing manually right now, but in a much more objective, faster and less expensive way,” Bernacchi said. Seed companies, large U.S. universities and overseas partners field tested 20 of the TerraSentia robots last spring through an early Continue 8