This Robot Handles The Entire Process Of Growing Lettuce By Itself

Inside a warehouse in the middle of the suburban office sprawl of San Carlos, a Silicon Valley town south of San Francisco, hundreds of heads of lettuce and herbs grow next to a mobile robot designed to move the plants as they get bigger. In a lab next door, engineers tweak robots that can handle every part of the growing process, from planting seeds to packaging harvested heads of lettuce for a grocery store.By early 2018, Iron Ox, the startup behind the R&D farm, plans to open an 8,000-square-foot production farm nearby–all fully automated, in a system that the company says can make local, pesticide-free food production as cheap as traditional agriculture in the field.In the company’s system, a robotic arm plants seeds in a tightly-packed tray, where the seeds germinate in nutrient-filled water. As the plants get bigger, the arm can transplant them to a tray with more space, and then transplant them again a couple of weeks later. Moving the plants maximizes the number of plants that can grow in a tight space.The robotic arm also uses a camera to scan each plant and note any problems. “We can actually observe is it the right size, is it the right color, does it have any pest pressure or mildew or anything like that,” he says. Plants with mildew, which can easily spread, can be automatically removed. The robots can use machine learning over time to optimize how the plants are grown.