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Robot gardener grows plants as well as humans do but uses less water

A vegetable-growing trial has pitted expert human gardeners against an AI-powered robot – both produced comparable crops, but the robot used about 40 per cent less water

By Alex Wilkins

11 June 2023

An automated robot gardener has shown its nurturing side by matching humans in trials of growing vegetables – and it did it with more efficient use of water.

Simeon Adebola at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues have developed an automated plot, called AlphaGarden, that contains a mix of plant types and tested whether it can perform as well as a team of six expert human horticulturalists, each with 10 years of gardening experience, on average.

The robot and human-run plots both contained pairs of eight different common edible vegetables, such as kale, chard and radicchio. Where the humans …

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