Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots

葡萄种植者的下一个合作者? 机器人

Short Wave

科学

2024-12-10

13 分钟
PDF

单集简介 ...

If you crossed WALL-E with a floor lamp, it might look a little like the PhytoPatholoBot. 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. 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 at shortwave@npr.org. We'd love to hear from you! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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单集文稿 ...

  • Hi, it's Marielle Segarra from Life.

  • Kid.

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  • You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

  • Hey, Shortwavers.

  • Emily Kwong here with shortwave producer Hannah Chin.

  • And I see you've brought a friend.

  • I have.

  • This is the sound of a robot rolling down a row of grapes and diagnosing the problems in the grape prep drives by itself.

  • And while it kind of traverses through the vineyard, it takes the images of the grapevine canopy and start to use the input image to identify the disease infection.

  • So this is Yujiang.

  • He's an assistant professor of systems engineering and data analytics for specialty crops at Cornell Agritech.

  • Very long title, super long title.

  • But what it means is that he's the nationwide expert on grape robotics.

  • And he and his colleagues at Cornell Agritech, which is in upstate New York, where I went to interview him, built this grape scanning robot.

  • I'm going to send you a picture of that robot now, Emily, and we can make it the COVID image for this episode so our listeners can look at it, too.

  • Okay.

  • Oh, look at her go.