"There's a real need to accelerate breeding to meet global food demand," said principal investigator Girish Chowdhary, an assistant professor of field robotics in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering and the Coordinated Science Lab at Illinois. "In Africa, the population will more than double by 2050, but today the yields are only a quarter of their potential." Crop breeders run massive experiments comparing thousands of different cultivars, or varieties, of crops over hundreds of acres and measure key traits, like plant emergence or height, by hand. The task is expensive, time-consuming, inaccurate, and ultimately inadequate -- a team can only manually measure a fraction of plants in a field. "The lack of automation for measuring plant traits is a bottleneck to progress," said first author Erkan Kayacan, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.