Garden Bots
Thought the iRobot Roombas were only good for collecting dust bunnies? Think again! At MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intellgence Laboratory (CSAIL for short), Roombas have been reimagined so that they now can collect fruit! These are no ordinary Roombas, though. As you can see above, they have been severely tinkered with to produce the above gardening robot. At this amazing garden, a protype for a larger and more comprehensively autonomous greenhouse, the robots can water and polinate plants, locate and gather the fruit, and most amazing of all, respond to requests from the plants. Yes, I didn’t mistype: the plants can actually communicate to the robots!
“Networked sensors help the plants ‘request’ water or nutrients from their robotic gardeners… giving each plant the ability to monitor and broadcast its own physical state allows the robots to distribute resources and care on demand.” source
We may be looking at the garden of the future! But we’d better not tell any of this to Meticulor. He might get jealous.
Posted in Features, Real Life Robots | 1 Comment »
July 24th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
[...] this past year in the varieties of fields that the robotic sciences apply to, from the scientific (Garden Bots, Robots Simulate Evolution) to the social/artistic (Robot Rolls, Rocks, Tweenbots Capture [...]