The intelligent breeding robot named 'Ji'er' has received a new embodied AI upgrade. The robot was officially unveiled in Beijing on September 4, following its initial development by a team led by Xu Cao from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The updated system is capable of performing complex agricultural tasks, including the identification and localization of flower stamens, pollination, and phenotypic data collection. During a demonstration, the robot utilized a dual-arm setup to pollinate tomato flowers, completing the process in under 10 seconds per flower.
The robot's efficiency is supported by a specialized pollination pen, which can perform approximately 50 pollinations with a single application of pollen. To facilitate this, agricultural experts utilized biotechnology to expose the crop's stamen stigmas, creating a clear workspace for the robot to operate among foliage.
The original version of the 'Ji'er' robot was introduced as the world's first autonomous cruise hybrid pollination breeding machine. The research team integrated biotechnology with artificial intelligence to achieve these results, with their findings previously published in the journal Cell.