Can Machines Garden? Systematically Comparing the AlphaGarden vs. Professional Horticulturalists

Simeon Adebola; Rishi Parikh; Mark Presten; Satvik Sharma; Shrey Aeron; Ananth Rao; Sandeep Mukherjee; Tomson Qu; Christina Wistrom; Eugen Solowjow; Ken Goldberg

arXiv · 2306.17162

Can Machines Garden? Systematically Comparing the AlphaGarden vs. Professional Horticulturalists

Simeon Adebola·Rishi Parikh·Mark Presten·Satvik Sharma·Shrey Aeron·Ananth Rao·Sandeep Mukherjee·Tomson Qu·Christina Wistrom·Eugen Solowjow·Ken Goldberg

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Abstract

The AlphaGarden is an automated testbed for indoor polyculture farming which combines a first-order plant simulator, a gantry robot, a seed planting algorithm, plant phenotyping and tracking algorithms, irrigation sensors and algorithms, and custom pruning tools and algorithms. In this paper, we systematically compare the performance of the AlphaGarden to professional horticulturalists on the staff of the UC Berkeley Oxford Tract Greenhouse. The humans and the machine tend side-by-side polyculture gardens with the same seed arrangement. We compare performance in terms of canopy coverage, plant diversity, and water consumption. Results from two 60-day cycles suggest that the automated AlphaGarden performs comparably to professional horticulturalists in terms of coverage and diversity, and reduces water consumption by as much as 44%. Code, videos, and datasets are available at https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/systematiccomparison.

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Simeon Adebola, Rishi Parikh, Mark Presten, Satvik Sharma, Shrey Aeron, Ananth Rao, Sandeep Mukherjee, Tomson Qu, Christina Wistrom, Eugen Solowjow, Ken Goldberg. 2023-06-29. Can Machines Garden? Systematically Comparing the AlphaGarden vs. Professional Horticulturalists. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17162

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