Quick Dips

Robotic Gardener

A research group has been given almost $600,000 for a three-year project to develop a cheaper, faster means of automating tissue culture.

Tissue culture is used to mass produce plants by raising tiny seedlings in a culture medium. It is boring, painstaking manual labour to get thousands of baby plants that share the same characteristics.

The Forest Research Institute, Agricultural Engineering Institute and the DSIR's Crop Research Division hope to change that. They plan to develop an automated system that will identify new shoots, cut them and transfer them to a new culture solution, top shoots that get too long, trim dead leaves and divide any clumps that form.

The Japanese and Americans have robot planters but they're extremely expensive. The local project team want to use off-the-shelf components to bring the cost down from $300,000 to something more suited to New Zealand budgets.