This Army of AI Robots Will Feed the World
At Blue River Technology headquarters, a prototype learns to distinguish weeds from crops.
Photographer: Justin Kaneps for Bloomberg BusinessweekJorge Heraud is in a California lettuce field, and he’s about to lose his mind. It’s a balmy, cloudless day in October 2014. Salinas Valley stretches out around him like a Hidden Valley Ranch commercial, its endless rows of emerald leaves pushing up through the black soil. Heraud has come here to test Potato, a robot you might call the agricultural equivalent of an Apple 1 prototype circa 1976. The machine is trying to thin baby lettuce plants so the hardiest ones have space to mature. If you’re imagining a C-3PO-style bipedal contraption with pincerlike hands that do the yanking, Potato isn’t that. It looks like a huge metal Pez dispenser laid sideways on a rack hitched to the back of a tractor. The robot “sees” the seedlings via cameras mounted on the rack. In milliseconds it identifies the strongest plants and zaps the weaklings with jets of fertilizer so concentrated it’s deadly.
Or that’s what Heraud’s machine is supposed to do, but right now it’s on the fritz. Robots like controlled environments, and Potato’s delicate equipment isn’t responding well to the heat, dust, and the vibrations from the tractor. Electrical components are short-circuiting, nozzles are failing, and dirt is gumming up the cooling fans. About every half-hour, all day long, the monitors on the PCs that guide Potato freeze into blue screens of death.