Robot Tended Tomato Garden

This is one of the most refreshing and clever uses of robotic technology that I've come across in a while - using robots to tend a tomato garden. The garden came about from the work of postdoc Nikolaus Correll who works in the MIT Distributed Robotics Lab and was part of an undergraduate class taught in the Fall of 2008. The garden uses iRobot Create's, equipped with 4 DOF arms to tend the plants. Each robot is equipped with a watering system and each plant monitors its soil humidity. When a plant needs water a request is sent, via a mesh network, to the robots, which water the plants. A camera on each robot also catalogs the location and ripeness of the tomatoes on the plants for harvesting. You can read more about the garden here and here (pdf). Video of the robotic garden in action after the jump.

[Via Boing Boing]