A robot roams through rows of grapes at Cornell AgriTech's Geneva vineyards to look for signs of diseased plants.
Allison Usavage/Cornell University
Lights, camera, action!
Looking at Cornell's PhytoPatholoBot, it's not immediately obvious what the little robot is designed to do. With its low-riding base, grippy wheels, flashing lights and camera set-up (set to take two photos per second), it looks like a mashup of WALL-E and a floor lamp.
But these robots aren't roving through space or decorating a living room. They're monitoring the stems, leaves and fruit of Cornell AgriTech's vineyards, rolling down each row and scanning for mildew that could threaten grape growers' crops.
Phillip Lujan, plant pathologist and assistant professor at New Mexico State University, calls powdery mildew and downy mildew "two of the most devastating diseases found in grapes." That's because even a small amount of mildew infection – as little as three to five percent – can render a grape crop completely unusable.
Due to climate change, weather patterns are becoming more unpredictable. That means that crops around the country – including grapes – are increasingly stressed.
"A stressed plant in general is more susceptible to disease," Lujan says. "A happy plant is well-fed, well-irrigated and they can defend themselves from a lot of these diseases that are out there. But if they're stressed out because of climate change, they're less able to protect themselves, and so you get a lot more diseases."
Part of the solution? Identifying and treating those diseases as early as possible...via robots.
In this episode, host Emily Kwong and producer Hannah Chinn take a trip to Cornell to check out these new robots. How do they work? How effective are they? And what do local grape farmers – and neighbors – think about them?
Interested in more robotics stories? Email us atshortwave@npr.org. We'd love to hear from you!
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This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Hannah Chinn reported, Tyler Jones checked the facts and Zo vanGinhoven was the audio engineer.