One of the grand technical challenges of our generation is to get ready to feed 9 billion people by 2050 with sustainable use of water and chemicals. However, we are facing unprecedented challenges in adopting sustainable agricultural management practices, increasing production, keeping agriculture profitable and coping with deadly biotic and abiotic stresses and diseases as well as changing climate that threaten yield. This project aims to transform Cyber-Physical System (CPS) capabilities in agriculture to enable farmers to respond to crop stressors with lower cost, greater agility, and significantly lower environmental impact than current practices. The objective is to make foundational advances in AI, machine learning and robotics to individual plant-level sensing, modeling and reasoning. This enables small autonomous dexterous robots instead of the heavy farm equipment to monitor plants or small plots individually and treat them with minimum amount of chemicals. This also lowers the barrier to entry for small scale farmers, increases safety, minimizes runoff as well as soil compaction. This project includes a significant collaboration with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that is funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

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Iowa State University
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NSF
Frankie King Submitted by Frankie King on November 9th, 2023
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