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AlphaGarden Robot Cares For Gardens Better Than Humans
UC Berkeley has been working on robotic gardens since the early 1990's!
(UC Berkeley’s AlphaGarden prunes some of its plants.)
AlphaGarden is a combination of a commercial gantry robot farming system and UC Berkeley’s AlphaGardenSim, which tells the robot what to do to maximize plant health and growth. The system includes a high-resolution camera and soil moisture sensors for monitoring plant growth, and everything is (mostly) completely automated, from seed planting to drip irrigation to pruning. The garden itself is somewhat complicated, since it’s a polyculture garden (meaning of different plants). Polyculture farming mimics how plants grow in nature; its benefits include pest resilience, decreased fertilization needs, and improved soil health. But since different plants have different needs and grow in different ways at different rates, polyculture farming is more labor-intensive than monoculture, which is how most large-scale farming happens.
Fans of science fiction writer Frank Herbert may recall the wet planet garden from his 1965 novel Dune; the garden was tended by simple, automatic machinery:
Every available space in the room was crowded with exotic wet-climate plants. Something rustled in the greenery. She tensed, then glimpsed a simple clock-set servok with pipe and hose arms. An arm lifted, sent out a fine spray of dampness that misted her cheeks. The arm retracted and she looked at what it had watered: a fern tree.
(Read more about the servok from Dune)
Fans of the 1972 movie Silent Running will also remember that Bruce Dern took tended his garden with the help of robots.
"It calls back a time when there were flowers all over the Earth... and there were valleys. And there were plains of tall green grass that you could lie down in - you could go to sleep in. And there were blue skies, and there was fresh air... and there were things growing all over the place, not just in some domed enclosures blasted some millions of miles out in to space."
(Gardening robots from Silent Running)
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