Alphabet's Latest X Project Is a Crop-Sniffing Plant Buggy

Alphabet's X lab has officially announced its latest "moonshot": a computational agriculture project the company is calling Mineral. The Verge reports: The project is focused on sustainable food production and farming at large scales, with a focus on "developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics and more," according to project lead Elliott Grant. A blog post outlining the project's vision says Mineral, which now has an official name but may have launched in secret around 2017 according to Grant's LinkedIn page, will try and aim technology toward solving issues around sustainability. Those include feeding of Earth's growing population, and producing crops more efficiently by understanding growth cycles and weather patterns. The project will also hope to manage land and plant life as the effects of climate change complicate ecosystems. "Just as the microscope led to a transformation in how diseases are detected and managed, we hope that better tools will enable the agriculture industry to transform how food is grown," explains Grant. "Over the last few years my team and I have been developing the tools of what we call computational agriculture, in which farmers, breeders, agronomists, and scientists will lean on new types of hardware, software, and sensors to collect and analyze information about the complexity of the plant world." One of the first of these tools is a new four-wheel rover-like prototype, what the Mineral team are calling a plant buggy, study crops, soil, and other environmental factors using a mix of cameras, sensors, and other onboard equipment. The team then uses the data collected and combines it with satellite imagery and weather data to create predictive models for how the plants will grow using machine learning and other AI training techniques. The Mineral team says it's already using the prototypes to study soybeans in Illinois and strawberries in California. "Over the past few years, the plant buggy has trundled through strawberry fields in California and soybean fields in Illinois, gathering high quality images of each plant and counting and classifying every berry and every bean. To date, the team has analyzed a range of crops like melons, berries, lettuce, oilseeds, oats and barley -- from sprout to harvest," reads Mineral's website. Grant says the Mineral team will collaborate with plant breeders and growers, farmers, and other agricultural experts to come up with solutions that are practical and have real-world benefits.

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