I’m not going to tell you to stop having babies, but the hard truth is that the population of Homo sapiens will skyrocket to perhaps 9 billion by 2050. More people means more emissions, which means runaway global warming, which means the agriculture required to feed those 9 billion people is in peril.
Call humanity a cancer, call it a virus, but neither of those things ever invented a robot to eyeball corn plants. Allow me to introduce you to Vinobot, the little rover on a mission to make sure crops weather global warming.
Vinobot has a partner in this, a solar-powered tower that keeps watch over a field. Using 3-D cameras, it builds a picture of the crops, looking for individual plants under stress. Should the tower spot something awry, it dispatches Vinobot. The rover uses its robotic arm to create a detailed 3-D model of the plant, showing scientists the exact angles of leaves, for instance, to determine how different kinds of corn handle drought. (Corn leaves tend to droop in the heat, reducing the surface area exposed to the sun.)
Vinobot also collects humidity, light intensity, and temperature data at the bottom, middle, and top of the shoot. “We collect those at three different heights because we're trying to study how the density of planting is affecting the individual plants,” says the robot’s developer, Gui DeSouza, of the University of Missouri. If humanity expects to feed itself in the coming decades, it must figure out how to increase yields, which means packing more crops into the same amount of land.
All of this data will help scientists understand how corn will fare in a warming world. And corn is just the start: Vinobot could trundle into fields of other crops as well. “We have a growing population that demands more and more food,” says DeSouza. “We have to produce more, we have to optimize the field, we have to optimize the planting, we have to increase the density. How are we going to adapt to those needs?”
Robots are certainly a start. Because good luck getting humans to stop making babies.
