A New Prospect Sustainably Feeding the Globe Using Agricultural Robots—Girish Chowdhary—Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department, University of Illinois
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2018
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Right now in today's vast agricultural fields, teams of semi-autonomous, low-cost, and intelligent robots are scanning fields of corn and providing measurements that will allow breeders to better characterize the environment and breed better seeds. The next task will be for these robots to autonomously collect more complex information that will allow for earlier detection of plant diseases and nutritional deficiencies.
Drones are commonly used for the collection of data in large-scale farming today, but the robots that are being designed in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering Department at the University of Illinois can detect what's unobservable by drones by harnessing a higher level of resolution that can only be achieved from working under the canopy. What's the third task planned for these robots? Acts of manipulation, such as weeding and pruning, which will be unprecedented.
As an assistant professor working on this project, Girish Chowdhary discusses how the deployment and development of these robots will cause us to rethink the way we do agriculture and allow for the globe to be fed in a sustainable way from small gardens with multiple plants. However, he also discusses some of the biggest challenges, which involve the varying and unpredictable nature of outdoor environments. Will robots be able to learn to operate intelligently enough to mitigate uncertainty and unforeseen changes?
Tune in for the full discussion, reach out to Girish via email at girishc@illinois.edu, and visit daslab.illinois.edu for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner of Future Technology Podcasts with Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:07.0 | Future Technologies is to transform our lives for better or worse or the focus of this podcast. |
| 0:13.0 | Almost here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used. |
| 0:17.0 | Or just around the corner, for Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, |
| 0:21.0 | 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more. |
| 0:25.0 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Future Check Podcast. |
| 0:31.0 | My guest is Gereish Chowdery. He's an assistant professor in the agricultural and |
| 0:36.4 | biological engineering department at the University of Illinois. Gerech, how you doing today? |
| 0:41.3 | I'm doing great. How are you rich? |
| 0:43.0 | Good, good. |
| 0:44.0 | Yes, so tell me, you know, I see my notes you work in the intelligent robotics laboratory so what kind of work are you doing there? |
| 0:50.8 | So I work in the area of field robotics, which is essentially robots that operate in outdoor |
| 0:57.7 | environments trying to do difficult things. |
| 1:00.8 | Okay. |
| 1:01.8 | So what are some examples of outdoor like in a mine under the earth or outdoor or just in a field? |
| 1:09.2 | Right, right. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, farming is basically the main area where I'm focusing on right now, but in the past I've focused on defense type applications and an autonomy type applications, but currently I'm focusing on agricultural robotics. |
| 1:27.9 | So in that case the robots would be operating in outdoor environments that are unstructured, changing, and uncertain. |
| 1:37.0 | Yeah, when I think of agricultural robotics, I think of just like a gigantic combine, you know, going through a field and, you know, pulling in plants and chopping |
| 1:45.6 | them up of the robots you're working on, those kind or are the different smaller ones that do |
| 1:50.3 | different tasks? |
| 1:51.3 | Right, yeah, that's very true. The current way the agricultural equipment is designed |
| 1:56.9 | is to be very large and powerful and basically to reduce or enable one person to take care of large areas in a |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Richard Jacobs, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Richard Jacobs and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.