Bengaluru, NFAPost: Alphabet has revealed a new moonshot from its X Labs, showcasing a robotic buggy that roves over crops while examining each plant individually. This helps in generating some valuable “big data” to revolutionise agriculture and work towards sustainable food production for fulfilling the ever-growing hunger of this world.
The project codenamed ‘Mineral’ is currently in its nascent experimental stage with the idea of digitising agriculture at the global level. With sustainable food production gradually gaining significance, there is a growing need for digitising agriculture with the use of big data.
Google recently revealed its plans to launch the project in a blog post and also on its X- company website. The Mineral project took birth with the idea of inspecting every plant individually and tailoring specific adjustments in the usage of fertilisers and insecticides.
“These new streams of data are either overwhelming or don’t measure up to the complexity of agriculture, so they defer back to things like tradition, instinct or habit,” writes Mineral head Elliott Grant. He adds, what’s needed is something both more comprehensive and more accessible.
The concept of Mineral has been inspired by Google’s idea of indexing and organising info on the World Wide Web. The project proposes the use of a “Plant buggy” to intelligently monitor the crops while tirelessly roaming the fields for tedious and monotonous inspections about plant-specific needs.
Earlier, FarmWise had raised some funds to launch a similar full-fledged project featuring plant-intelligence platform.
The Mineral project details are still scarce as was the case with previous X projects. Nevertheless, we could soon unearth more information about the intelligent robo-buggy that is capable of reducing the agricultural waste by 10% in comparison to traditional methods.
