Alphabet's Latest Moonshot is a Plant-Inspecting Robot

Want to grow food sustainably on a global scale? You're going to need more than a few tractors and plows. Enter Alphabet's X lab moonshot Mineral--a "computational agriculture" project. "Alongside experts in the field--literally and figuratively--we've been developing and testing a range of software and hardware prototypes based on breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, simulation, sensors, robotics, and more," Elliott Grant, project lead at X, wrote in a blog post. "From strawberry fields in California to soybean fields in Illinois, we've been learning about crops from sprout to harvest," he continued.