In a research field off Highway 54 last autumn, corn stalks shimmered in rows 40-feet deep. Girish Chowdhary, an agricultural engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bent to place a small white robot at the edge of a row marked 103. The robot, named TerraSentia, resembled a souped up version of a lawn mower, with all-terrain wheels and a high-resolution camera on each side. In much the same way that self-driving cars "see" their surroundings, TerraSentia navigates a field by sending out thousands of laser pulses to scan its environment. A few clicks on a tablet were all that were needed to orient the robot at the start of the row before it took off, squeaking slightly as it drove over ruts in the field.

A new lightweight, low-cost agricultural robot could transform data collection and field scouting for agronomists, seed companies and farmers. The TerraSentia crop phenotyping robot, developed by a team of scientists at the University of Illinois, will be featured at the 2018 Energy Innovation Summit Technology Showcase in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 14. Traveling autonomously between crop rows, the robot measures the traits of individual plants using a variety of sensors, including cameras, transmitting the data in real time to the operator's phone or laptop computer. A custom app and tablet computer that come with the robot enable the operator to steer the robot using virtual reality and GPS. TerraSentia is customizable and teachable, according to the researchers, who currently are developing machine-learning algorithms to "teach" the robot to detect and identify common diseases, and to measure a growing variety of traits, such as plant and corn ear height, leaf area index and biomass.

A new lightweight, low-cost agricultural robot could transform data collection and field scouting for agronomists, seed companies and farmers. The TerraSentia crop phenotyping robot, developed by a team of scientists at the University of Illinois, will be featured at the 2018 Energy Innovation Summit Technology Showcase in National Harbor, Maryland, on March 14. Traveling autonomously between crop rows, the robot measures the traits of individual plants using a variety of sensors, including cameras, transmitting the data in real time to the operator's phone or laptop computer. A custom app and tablet computer that come with the robot enable the operator to steer the robot using virtual reality and GPS. TerraSentia is customizable and teachable, according to the researchers, who currently are developing machine-learning algorithms to "teach" the robot to detect and identify common diseases, and to measure a growing variety of traits, such as plant and corn ear height, leaf area index and biomass.