VISION Conference Preview: Someday, AI Might Grow Better Plants than People
Carnegie Mellon University Professor George Kantor (right) discusses robotics and AI work at CMU with Meister Media’s Matthew Grassi.
It’s a matter I’ve ran into quite a bit more since moving over from our row crop group to cover ag tech on the specialty and greenhouse side of the farming coin: Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics one day be able to grow plants better than a seasoned grower?
Carnegie Mellon University Senior Systems Scientist George Kantor, a well-known ag robotics researcher and educator at the Robotics Institute at CMU, recently hosted me and a couple colleagues here at Meister Media Worldwide (MMW) for a quick look around his lab and to hear what Kantor’s been working on lately as a lead-up to his upcoming presentation at the 2020 PrecisionAg VISION Conference.
With the results of the Autonomous Greenhouses International Challenge still fresh in mind, I posed the aforementioned AI query to Kantor himself. I mean, who better to ask than someone so close to the technology and its realistic capabilities in ag?
Though I must admit, his answer still surprised me.
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“So, I think that the answer to that question, and it’s one we get all the time from growers, is a qualified ‘Yes’,” Kantor responded.
Specifically, where AI can really move the needle for growers, according to the researcher, is in enabling grower knowledge to scale up across multiple locations and facilities. “One really excellent crop manager can now (because of AI) manage a much bigger area or facility,” he says.
And this is not merely applicable to traditional specialty crops or the old row crop stalwarts of the Midwest.
Kantor foresees the emerging crop demand beasts in legal cannabis and hemp – crops that are literally exploding with bin-busting grower interest – among the first mass adopters of AI-enabled tech.
“You can buy a can of Coca Cola anywhere in the world and you know exactly what you’re going to get, and if you got something different every time, you’d probably stop buying Coca Cola. I think cannabis is going to be the same way,” he explains.
“Growers are going to have to scale up their management practices to region-wide or even country-wide type of operations. So, how is this one guy, this one grower, going to manage this national network of contract growers and get a consistent product out? I think AI helps a lot with that.”
Of course, anytime we talk about AI and robotics and growing crops, the question inevitably veers to whether we’ll one day see a future where our robot overlords seize control of the farmland and leave us puny-brained humans in the dust?
“I don’t think it replaces the person. I don’t think there will ever come a day where we just push a button and the greenhouse starts spitting out perfect tomatoes.”
Carnegie Mellon’s George Kantor joins Washington State’s Manoj Karkee and Dot Technology’s Cory Beaujot in a discussion of “Real-Time, Real-World Robotics and Automation” at the 2020 PrecisionAg VISION Conference, Jan. 14-16 in Seattle, WA. To register, visit TheVisionConference.com.
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