Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots

If you crossed WALL-E with a floor lamp, it might look a little like the PhytoPatholoBot. These robots aren't roving through space or decorating a living room — they're monitoring the stems, leaves and fruit of Cornell AgriTech's vineyards, rolling down each row and scanning for mildew. In this episode, host Emily Kwong and producer Hannah Chinn take a trip to Cornell to check out these new robots. How do they work? How effective are they? And what do local grape farmers – and neighbors – think about them? Interested in more robotics stories? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. We'd love to hear from you! See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Emily Kwong?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Emily Kwong here with Short Wave producer Hannah Chin. And I see you've brought a friend. I have. This is the sound of a robot. Oh. Rolling down a row of grapes and diagnosing the problems in the grape crop.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Drives by itself. And while it kind of traverses through the vineyard, it takes the images of the grape vine canopy and start to use the input image to identify the disease infection.

• 0:49Emily Kwong?

  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 AgriTech, which is in upstate New York, where I went to interview him, built this grape scanning robot. I'm gonna 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. OK. 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, that'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.

• 1:34Emily Kwong?

  For data crunching, I imagine. Well, I want to learn more about this robot. Like, does it have a name? This one specifically does not have a name. But as a whole, all of these robots are called Phytopatholabots, or PBB for short.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  PBB, Phytopatholabot. But also, I think from the engineering perspective, I love the acronym because it's short for parts per billing, means super accurate.

• 1:59Emily Kwong?

  But what are they doing? Why are they roving these rows with cameras of all things? Are we just setting ourselves up to be replaced by robo-farmers? I mean, Emily, I can't give it all away. Let's just wait till after the break. Fair, OK. So today on the show, the infections imperiling our grapes and the robots that could help farmers fight back. You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 3:53Emily Kwong?

  Han, I am obsessed with robots. I actually dressed up as Eve for Halloween with my partner Duncan as Wally. That's so cute. And I really want to know all about Wally's cousins. This robot is so cute. Let's first talk about the problem the robot is solving for. It has to do with crops and crop disease. Yes. So there's actually two types of diseases that growers are trying to tackle here. There's powdery mildew and downy mildew.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  These are two of the most devastating, I guess, diseases found in grapes.

• 4:27Emily Kwong?

  This is Philip Luhon. He's a plant pathologist and assistant professor at New Mexico State University, and he's responsible for disease diagnostics for crops, really throughout the whole state. He says these two diseases reduce the sugar content in these grapes. They make the grapes bitter and lower quality. Even as little as 3% to 5% of mildew infection in a vineyard can make the entire grape crop unusable for wine production. An infection of this extent, it's been described by researchers as giving the wine an oily, viscous mouthfeel.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Ugh, terrible. Okay. What is causing this mildew? Isn't mildew usually related to dampness?

• 5:06Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, so these two diseases, downy mildew and powdery mildew, they're caused by two totally different organisms.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Oh, like these infections are not related to each other?

• 5:16Emily Kwong?

  No, not at all. Philip told me one is caused by a fungus and the other one is caused by a fungal organism. Kind of like a water mold?

• 5:23Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 5:24Emily Kwong?

  But the effect is low-key similar.

• 5:26Speaker 04

  The name is very descriptive of powdery mildew. It just looks like some white powder on the top of the leaves. And if you look at downy mildew-infected leaves, on the top of the leaves, you're going to get sort of a yellowing color, sort of like an oil spot.

• 5:45Emily Kwong?

  You can tell which leaves are affected because they're like flaky or dirty-looking. Powdery mildew creates cracks or lesions in the grapes, and downy mildew makes them more shrivly and discolored.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  That's a sad state for these poor plants. Okay.

• 5:59Emily Kwong?

  And these types of mildew, they aren't just gross-looking. They're also really bad for the plants and their grapes.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  It reduces photosynthesis. It also reduces like crop yields as well. It can also affect grape quality.

• 6:14Emily Kwong?

  And Emily, once that mildew sets in, it's really hard to shake.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  What do you mean?

• 6:20Emily Kwong?

  So Philip lives in New Mexico, where downy mildew isn't as much of an issue, right? Because it's so dry. And that's true also in California, which is where the majority of US grapes are produced. But he says that powdery mildew, the fungus-spread disease, is capable of spreading anywhere. It can even overwinter, which means it survives through the cold season and then infects new leaves when it rains in the spring.

• 6:43Speaker 04

  When you get that rainfall, that rain splash, they sort of start the growing process of the fungus on the leaf. It develops spores, and then those spores splash onto the new leaf, you know, in the spring. So that's sort of that disease cycle.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  That is so pernicious. I mean, I, it just...

• 7:02Emily Kwong?

  Knows the tenacity of this fungus, respect. Yeah. But also, these poor grapes. Yeah, but grape growers are constantly working to combat this threat.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  Growers often spray 10 to 15 times fungicides per year. And so that's, that's very concerning because, you know, these, these pathogens are always evolving. And so they're becoming more and more resistant to these sprays because they're spraying so often.

• 7:28Emily Kwong?

  So it's like when humans take antibiotics, the pathogens in our body can become more resistant in response to antibiotics. And then we have to take stronger ones more often and it can become this vicious cycle. That's exactly the analogy that Philip used to explain this to me. He said these grape diseases are developing resistance faster than we're developing treatments. And so for that reason, we need to diversify the methods that we're using.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  So it takes a really, really long time for a new fungicide to come out into the market. And so, you know, it could take 10, 15, 20 years to develop that. And so, you know, these, these fungi are becoming resistant at a much quicker rate.

• 8:17Emily Kwong?

  So if we don't want to use so many fungicides, the best thing to do is detect this mildew as early as possible, way before it becomes a problem. Right, treat it at the source. How do people go about doing that? So it's a really hard job and it's usually done by skilled workers, right? People who are trained on how to spot these early stages of mildew. Mm-hmm. But they also have to be out in the field where there's no shade. They're walking down every row and they're looking at each plant. And Yu Jiang from Cornell, he told me it can be really hard on those workers.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  I know many people are gonna say, oh yeah, I'm gonna enjoy the sunlight. But imagine you're gonna work. Eight hours per day for the whole year of your job, just being in the field.

• 9:04Emily Kwong?

  Walking up and down the grape rows.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yes, and you need to check all these diseases we just look at around. You change your mind and you lose your passion.

• 9:13Emily Kwong?

  Okay, so is this the job for these uniquely equipped grape robots? This is a job for the robots. They go up and down the rows and they scan all the grapevines, like I mentioned earlier, and they take hundreds of thousands of pictures to detect the presence of mildew. But Emily, even among all these hundreds of thousands of pictures, there's a problem, and it has to do with lighting. Hmm.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Sometimes, you know, the image you're taking in the morning would look very different than in the evening, right? And that's actually caused a lot of problems later on for the AI models.

• 9:49Emily Kwong?

  Oh, they're using AI. Okay, so this is like a data problem, like the training data used for these robots says like disease looks one way, but out in the world, you're faced with all the variables of lighting of any photographer, where it might not look the same? Yeah, exactly.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  And especially many of these, you know, disease symptoms are based on the color. So that illumination gonna be a biggest challenge for the color consistency or the image quality consistency throughout the day.

• 10:21Emily Kwong?

  So to solve this problem of color consistency, they use flash for every single photo. It's like the grape robot version of a ring light. Nice. Well, they want that lighting to be consistent. So these robots, they roll down the row, they have their flash on. Yep, and they're taking a lot of photos, two photos per second. They just sound like my parents.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  You see current the robot kind of taking the picture.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  As I mentioned, once the picture is taken, it will transfer directly to the computer inside the small box.

• 10:52Emily Kwong?

  The computer then analyzes those photos and compares them to existing photos of diseased plants to make a diagnosis.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  And then the AI model will do the inference. Basically calculate how many pixels representing the infections versus how many pixels representing the canopy. And then after the scanning, it will generate the map to showing the infection severity at each geographic location.

• 11:18Emily Kwong?

  Okay. So basically what he's saying is that it creates this huge map of the grape field, right? Indicating both where the mildew is and how bad it is. This is very cool. Combine so much new technology from robotics to AI. How accurate, though, is this method?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  It is super accurate. So we just kind of finished a study to further verify its accuracy in terms of a disease detection for various kind of diseases in different states like California, New York, Western Virginia. And we found overall we achieve around, you know, over 90% of the accuracy for downy mildew, pottery mildew, and associated virus.

• 12:04Emily Kwong?

  Okay, 90% accuracy. That's, that's pretty good. And what happens when mildew is detected? When they find it, they still have to treat it, right? So you told me that eventually they're hoping to equip these robots with sprays so that they can treat the infections directly out in the field when they find them. That's cool. Yeah. And he showed me the next generation of these robots. They use similar technology to a Tesla, so they're actually self-driving. And they have cameras on both sides, so they can scan twice as fast as the original robot. You know, I said these robots were the cousin of Wally, but they're really the cousin of Eve. They're out here scanning plants to like protect nature. They're little eco warriors or something. Absolutely. But he's working on other robots, too.

• 12:46Emily Kwong?

  Most of them are stored in a huge barn when they're not working. Some of them are small and they roll through the field and pull weeds. Some of them are huge, like eight or nine feet tall, and they zap mildew in the middle of the night with UV light. But all of them are meant to make human grape farmers' jobs easier. And Emily, you knows that not everyone is as excited about the robots as he is, right? These big robots that treat mildew in the middle of the night? He told me that one time, the neighbors called the police because they didn't know what was going on.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  People just want to make sure everything is right. The operators cannot explain all the situation, but I think now people really understand, especially with years of this, you know, extension and outreach activities, people understand.

• 13:30Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, I'd be concerned if I saw a nine-foot-tall robot shining a UV light in the field next to me at midnight. I would think I was getting abducted. Yeah, like, is it aliens? What's happening? And the other concern that people have, that you mentioned to me, is like, what if these robots take human jobs, right? Are they going to replace us?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Many people think, oh, yeah, robots are going to replace humans. No, in my opinion, going to just complement, give us more capacity, more power, that we can do way more than Earth as an individual in the future.

• 14:05Emily Kwong?

  So he's saying, these robots, if they were like to scale in grape farms, in places that need them, they would have the potential to like, help the farmers with their work? Yeah, exactly. And he's working with pilot groups with farmers around Cornell, asking how they can make this technology work for them. Like, the ultimate goal of these robots isn't to take our jobs, it's just to help us do them differently.

• 14:33Emily Kwong?

  Hannah Chen, thank you for telling us all about these amazing robots. Yeah, thanks for having me. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson, and it was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Hannah Chen obviously did the fabulous reporting. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Zoe Vangenhoffen was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Hannah Chen. Thanks for listening to Short Wave from NPR.