Luckiest Tomato Plants Ever Have Their Own Robot Tenders
Writing by Evan Ackerman on Thursday, 19 of March , 2009 at 2:01 am
I don’t know what these particular tomato plants have done to deserve their own personal robot gardeners, but I hope that on whatever level tomato plants perceive the outside world, they realize how lucky they are. Each plant is equipped with a bunch of sensors, and through them, the plants can request water or nutrients, which are provided to them by some iRobot Create bases equipped with a robot arm and a watering pump.
Presumably, the plants can request anything else that they want, like more virtual sunlight or some pictures of pistils and stamens to keep themselves entertained. Don’t scoff, the robots are also programmed to masturbate pollinate the plants when necessary. Ultimately, the robots will even pick ripe tomatoes for you, but they stop just short of making you a delicious omelette.
Robots tending plants may seem like overkill considering that plans are generally fairly capable of taking care of themselves, but really, caring for plants (especially big fields of plants) is a lot of work. And, it’s fairly wasteful, since plants are treated as a group and may get more or less resources than they require to produce optimally. The vision is to create an entire networked greenhouse where individual plants ask for what they need and robots deliver it, which (if you don’t think too much about the cost of the robots) promises to be much more efficient than conventional agriculture.
[ CSAIL @ MIT ] VIA [ Physorg ]
Comments (1)
Category: Research
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Comment by ethan454
Made Tuesday, 24 of March , 2009 at 3:50 pm
As much as I love robots, wouldn’t it be way more efficiant and cost effective and lower mantenance to just have an irrigation/fertilarization system installed in the greenhouse that pampers the individual plants that doesn’t have to run around constantly?
Like making the entire greenhouse robotic instead of just throwing a few bots inside it.
