AlphaGarden (robot gardener)

2023: Robot Announcement

At the end of May 2023, American specialists from the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley) presented a specialized robotic system called AlphaGarden, designed to care for plants. Experiments have shown that in some situations the device does its tasks even better than human gardeners.

According to the IEEE Spectrum resource, AlphaGarden is a combination of a commercial portal system for robotic agriculture and an AlphaGardenSim solution created by UC Berkeley specialists. The platform instructs the robot on what manipulations need to be performed to maximize plant health and growth. To obtain information on the current state of plants, a high-resolution camera and soil moisture sensors are used. The entire process of care is almost completely automated - from sowing seeds to drip irrigation and pruning.

AlphaGarden (robot gardener)

Testing of the AlphaGarden complex was carried out on a multicultural site (meaning the close proximity of plants of different species), that is, in conditions close to the natural environment. Benefits of this approach include pest resistance, reduced fertilizer demand and improved soil health. On the other hand, since different plants have different needs and differ in growth rate, multicultural agriculture is more time-consuming than monoculture.

To test AlphaGarden's capabilities, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, planted two sites with the same seeds at the same time. There were 32 plants in total, including cabbage, cucumber, chard, mustard greens, turnips, green lettuce, cilantro and red lettuce. For two months, one site was constantly looked after by a robot, and another by professional gardeners.

The results of these tests showed that the robotic system was not inferior to human horticulturalists in terms of both overall plant diversity and coverage. In other words, the seedlings grew equally well. At the same time, the robot was able to reduce water consumption by 44%.^[1]

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