Researchers create robotic platform to plant crops that resist during floods

When climate becomes worse, man’s life gets badly damaged. We can’t stop climate changing condition but instead we can protect ourselves before the bad time hits us. Keeping this in mind a team of researchers at the University of Missouri are developing a pair of robotic platform. To make this project successful National science Foundation is funding $20 million to develop the system for identifying crop strains resistant to heat, drought and flood.

The researchers created a pair of robots- The mobile tower that stands at the edge of the crop and a roaming ‘bot that’s installed by the system to keep a check on it. The data includes 3D scans of the plants to keep a check on humidity, temperature; these climate changes tends to varies increase in propensity to plant crops closer together. Cameras are provided with 3D models to check on plants with biomass and thermal reading. This has the capacity to examine plants within a 60-foot radius that has been mounted on a spinning platform to collect info in the surrounded area. Currently the team is working on an independent version that can automatically gather data in tandem with the tower.

“A flying UAV is a little cumbersome, you have to have a pilot to fly it; you have to have a flight plan that has to be filed. Most of the time UAVs can’t fly at night. The main point of our research is how to correlate the plans development with the family.” says Gui DeSouza, an associate professor at the school and co-author of a paper for the project.

The idea behind developing Robotic platform is to create crops that get resistant to the climate change.