LEXINGTON, Ky. — As greenhouse agriculture continues to expand to meet growing food demands, researchers at the University of Kentucky are developing new technologies to produce healthier crops more efficiently, while also reducing the time and labor required to grow them.
Biyun Xie, an associate professor in the Stanley and Karen Pigman College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is the principal investigator on a nearly $1.2 million U.S. National Science Foundation grant to develop an autonomous robotic system that could transform how greenhouse-grown tomatoes are monitored and evaluated. Xie has partnered with co-principal investigator Qinglu Ying from the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment’s Department of Horticulture.
The project combines robotics, artificial intelligence, computer vision and wireless power technologies to create a mobile robotic platform capable of autonomously collecting detailed information about tomato plants in large-scale commercial greenhouses. The platform uses a mobile robotic arm to navigate greenhouse rows and move directly into the plant canopy, capturing high-quality images without disturbing plants and allowing AI models to generate precise, noninvasive measurements of individual tomato plants.
The research aims to improve the speed and accuracy of plant phenotyping — the process of measuring a plant’s physical characteristics such as fruit number, size, maturity, health status and canopy structure. The system will incorporate innovative dynamic wireless charging technology, allowing the robot to recharge while it operates and enabling uninterrupted data collection across large commercial greenhouses.
The project’s four primary research objectives include developing deep learning models for plant identification, creating new robotic motion-planning algorithms, designing AI models capable of simultaneously measuring dozens of tomato fruit traits, and developing an efficient wireless charging system for humid greenhouse environments.
Kentucky’s greenhouse industry has seen steady growth since the tobacco buyouts of the early 2000s, with the state’s geographic location within a day’s drive of a sizable portion of the contiguous United States bolstering an influx of greenhouse growers of all sizes.
“Kentucky is home to a large and growing greenhouse industry — making it an ideal setting for the deployment of advanced agricultural technologies,” Xie said. “This project has the potential to improve worker well-being by reducing labor-intensive and repetitive tasks, broaden participation in computing and engineering through student training and outreach activities, and strengthen workforce development in agricultural technology.”
The technologies developed in the project — including robotic active perception, computer vision models and dynamic wireless charging — have broad applicability beyond tomato cultivation, including selective fruit harvesting and leaf pruning, and a wide range of robotic automation systems beyond agriculture.
Sources
This article was generated by AI (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) based on source material from University of Kentucky News, enriched with 2 web searches. The original source is available at https://uknow.uky.edu/research/uk-researcher-developing-robot-grow-healthier-tomatoes.
