A collaboration between a biologist and an engineer is supercharging efforts to protect grape crops. The technology they’ve developed, using robotics and AI to identify grape plants infected with a devastating fungus, will soon be available to researchers nationwide in the U.S. working on a wide array of plant and animal research, according to the Cornell Chronicle.
Powdery mildew is a fungus that attacks many plants including wine and table grapes, leaves sickly white spores across leaves and fruit and costs grape growers worldwide billions of dollars annually in lost fruit and fungicide costs. A group of researchers and scientists has developed prototypes of imaging robots that could scan grape leaf samples automatically—a process called high-throughput phenotyping—along with the creation of a robotic camera named “BlackBird.”
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