Crop-roving Robots Will Improve Plant Phenotyping

A better way to help plant geneticists improve crop yield is on the way, thanks to a $3.1 million grant from the Department of Energy and the robotics expertise of CEE Research Assistant Professor Joshua Peschel. As part of a multi-disciplinary project led by researchers from the University of Illinois, Peschel is developing all-terrain automated ground rovers that will travel between crop rows in fields, gathering data for phenotyping, the process of describing growth, appearance and other factors affecting yield. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will be the lead institution on the Mobile Energy-crop Phenotyping Platform (MEPP), working in partnership with researchers from Cornell University and Signetron Inc.

Peschel is an expert in developing low-cost, field-ready robotics that combine new innovations in sensors and improved human-robot interaction – in other words, ease of use. His primary role of the project is to lead the development of the ground rovers, which will be able to travel between rows in the crop fields several times a day, viewing each plant and capturing pictures and videos. Peschel is also directing the big data analytics which will turn the information gathered into digitized, 3-D versions of the plants to yield information about individual plant growth, health and local climate and make that information easily accessible to various stakeholders. To enable processing of the collected data, the team will develop advanced biophysical computational models of crop growth and DNA-sequencing technologies, allowing association of genes with improved crop performance to accelerate breeding of energy sorghum. Once established, the techniques could be extended to other crops such as corn.

The use of the robots, which after the project are expected to be made commercially available to farmers and plant breeders at a cost of around $2,000, will be easier and more accurate than current methods, Peschel said.

“For a human to go out and do it would be very labor-intensive – and the phenotype measurements could be very wrong,” Peschel said. “Corn, for example, may grow about five centimeters a day. Well, the best automated field measurements today have an error of about five centimeters. So how do you really know how each plant is doing?”

The team’s work will provide a way to collect a massive amount of data and make it useful through scientific visualization, Peschel said. The resulting phenotyping platform will be extremely useful to plant geneticists, said Principal Investigator Steve Long, Gutsgell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences and faculty member at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology.

"High throughput field phenotyping is crucial to making full use of current ability to resequence many genetically unique lines in breeding improved bioenergy crops," Long said. "Current platforms involve expensive and cumbersome gantry systems or unmanned aerial vehicles that can see only the top of the crops. These all-terrain robotic platforms have a much lower cost, yet are easily transportable, so they will be within the reach of small breeding operations as well as the largest companies."

The U of I received this award from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture (TERRA) program, which will integrate agriculture, information technology, and engineering to address major global challenges providing sustainable, affordable, and abundant plant feedstocks for bioenergy. TERRA will also fund a large public database that will provide plant physiologists, bioinformaticians, and geneticists with the knowledge to improve sorghum and other bioenergy crops.

Peschel’s background is in the use of robotics in disaster response, but the principles and technology are adaptable for a wide range of uses and is becoming more affordable, he said.

“People were inspired back in the 1990s and early 2000s to go into rescue robotics by the Mars missions: ‘If we can spend a billion dollars to send little rovers to Mars, why aren’t we spending a fraction of that to try to help somebody who’s trapped in a collapsed building?’” Peschel said. “We used to talk about robots in increments of $50,000-$100,000 or more, but the cost of the individual components has come down in price in a way that we can engineer and build a very low-cost platform and make these kinds of new robotics technologies available to everybody.

“In the same way that the rescue robotics community was inspired by the missions to Mars, I’ve been inspired to change civil and environmental engineering by bringing these types of technologies into CEE. I see my contribution as looking at technologies that we’ve been developing for domains like disaster response and taking them in an entirely new direction to address problems in agriculture, urban infrastructure, and the natural environment.”

This work is funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a division of the Department of Energy that advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies for which it is too early for private-sector investment. In addition to Peschel, collaborators include Steve Long, Project Director, Professor of Crop Sciences at the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Carl Bernacchi, Associate Professor of Plant Biology at U of I; Edward Buckler, Professor of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Cornell; Avideh Zakhor of Signetron, who is also the Qualcomm Chair and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley; and Patrick Brown Assistant Professor of Crop Sciences at U of I.

Susan Jongeneel contributed to this story.

Sorghum photo: © istockphoto.com/David Sucsy