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The Robotanist

A robot for grabbing plants

The Robotanist drives through a young sorghum field, four sturdy wheels and one long tower on its front.
Image by Tim Mueller-Sim

I spent a summer working on the Robotanist, a project at Carnegie Mellon's Field Robotics Center to build a robot to detect plants in a field and gather data about them.

Robotics Institute Summer Scholars : 2016 : Maggie Oates

During the summer, I worked on adding software features to a 3D camera to improve vision in bright sunlight and outdoor environment. Computer vision tech has come a long way since I worked on this project.

Maggie gives a thumbs up in a muddy field, surrounded by chaotic electronics and supplies.
Field work in a sorghum field in the Carolinas.
The Robotanist: A ground-based agricultural robot for high-throughput crop phenotyping - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University
The established processes for measuring physiological and morphological traits (phenotypes) of crops in outdoor test plots are labor intensive and error-prone. Low-cost, reliable, field-based robotic phenotyping will enable geneticists to more easily map genotypes to phenotypes, which in turn will improve crop yields. In this paper, we present a novel robotic ground-based platform capable of […]
Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon UniversityMerritt Jenkins