Field Robot TerraSentia and Artificial Intelligence: Functionality | World of Farming KWS

In the USA, the plant breeder KWS is working with the agricultural start-up EarthSense at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to use the TerraSentia field robot and artificial intelligence to gain new knowledge for breeding more quickly.



The TerraSentia robot runs autonomously and GPS-controlled on an experimental field in Champaign, Illinois, and films phenotypic traits such as growth height, flowering time, resistance to diseases or thickness and length of the stems of wheat and other cereals.



The images captured by the robot via camera are transferred to a cloud. Scientists and breeders from KWS then teach the artificial intelligence (AI) in the cloud what characteristics can be seen in the photos. In this way, artificial intelligence learns to recognize plant traits.



Advantages: Phenotyping by machine learning is less error-prone and tiresome than by the human eye. In addition, the system can analyze more plants and create more knowledge for plant breeding than humans. Plus, the robot can be easily duplicated. This efficiency, reliability, scalability and quality will further improve seeds for agriculture. Nevertheless, humans are irreplaceable in plant breeding because only they are able to train the algorithm of artificial intelligence and implement the findings in breeding.



Further information can be found at the KWS World of Farming. https://www.kws.com/corp/en/company/p...