Robot with green thumb can identify plants and check health just by touching their leaves

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A new robot with an electronic green thumb can identify plant species just by touching their leaves. Using an approach inspired by human skin, the robot can also analyze the leaf's surface texture and the plant's water content more accurately than existing computer vision systems.

Eventually, "it could revolutionize crop management and ecosystem studies and enable early disease detection, which is crucial for plant health and food security," says Zhongqian Song, a researcher at Shandong First Medical University & Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences.

From Cell Press:

When an electrode in the robot makes contact with a leaf, the device learns about the plant by measuring several properties: the amount of charge that can be stored at a given voltage, how difficult it is for electrical current to move through the leaf, and contact force as the robot grips the leaf.

Next, this data is processed using machine learning in order to classify the plant, since different values for each measure correlate with different plant species and stages of growth.

While the robot shows "vast and unexpected" potential applications in fields ranging from precision agriculture to ecological studies to plant disease detection, it has several weaknesses that have yet to be addressed, says Song. For example, the device is not yet versatile enough to consistently identify types of plants with complicated structures, such as burrs and needle-like leaves. This could be remedied by improving the design of the robot's electrode, he says. 

Previously:
• This robot is controlled by a living mushroom (video)
• How regenerative crops and Afro-Indigenous farming techniques are putting carbon back in the ground