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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey, Shortwaver's Emily Kwong here with Shortwave producer Hannah Chin. And I see you've brought a friend. I have.

This is the sound of a robot, rolling down a row of grapes,

and diagnosing the problems in the grape prep.

Drives by itself, and while it kind of traverses through the vineyard,

it takes the images of the grapevine canopy

and start to use the input image to identify the disease infection.

So this is Yu Jiang. He's an assistant professor of systems engineering and data analytics

for specialty crops at Cornell Agritech. Very long title. Super long title. But what it means is that

he's the nationwide expert on grape robotics. And he and his colleagues at Cornell Agrite,

which is in upstate New York, where I went to interview him, built this grape scanning robot.

I'm going to send you a picture of that robot now, Emily, and we can make it the cover image for

this episode so our listeners can look at it too. Okay. Oh, look at her go. Yeah, it's like if Wally, like from Pixar had a baby with a floor lamp. It's, it's how I feel that this would look. Yeah, exactly. It's around five, maybe a little over five feet tall. Uh-huh. It's got wheels on the bottom and a camera on the side,

and then this kind of computer set up on the back.

For data crunching, I imagine.

Well, I want to learn more about this robot.

Like, does it have a name?

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