To help farmers, agriculturalists, and botanists monitor plants and crops in a massive field, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has a new X Labs project. Like many of their previous “Moonshot” projects, Alphabet’s new “Project Mineral” brings a robotic vehicle to monitor every crop or plant in a field, cataloging them individually.
The announcement of the project came via an official blog post from the team working on it. Although it is still in its experimental stages, the team thinks that this project has the potential to revolutionize the agricultural industry in the near future.
The team which is working on the project started off with it when they saw that there hasn’t been much development in digitizing agriculture. So, over the last few years, the team has been working to develop relevant tools for, what they call, computational agriculture.
As a result, the team led by the serial entrepreneur in the food and agricultural industry, Dr. Elliot Grant, developed a new “Plant Buggy” to autonomously navigate the fields and collect valuable information about the crops and plants. This autonomous robotic buggy will intelligently roam around a field and collect, what we call, the “big data” about all the plants and crops of a farmer or an agriculturalist.
This way, farmers and agricultural enthusiasts will be able to monitor each and every plant in their fields. Hence, they will be able to analyze which specific crop or plant needs what, at a given point in time.
So, with the Plant Buggy cataloging all the plants and crops in a field, farmers can get their hands on the huge amount of data to manage their crops much more easily than ever. And in the future, the Project Mineral team aims to introduce more such tools to improve agriculture all around the world.
