A two-armed robot pollinates tomato flowers in under ten seconds

I have a mental list of things that sound made up but aren't. China's new breeding robot just went on it.

It's called GEAIR 2.0. A team at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences built it, and they showed it at the 33rd China Beijing Seed Industry Conference. The name stands for Genome Editing plus AI Robotics, which tells you most of what you need to know.

What it does is hand pollination. Hybrid crop breeding means moving pollen from one plant to another by hand, one flower at a time. It's slow and fiddly, and people have been doing it with tiny brushes for a very long time. GEAIR 2.0 has two arms. One holds a pollen tube, the other holds a fine brush. It finds the stigma on a tomato blossom and pollinates it in under ten seconds. One dip of the brush covers about 50 flowers. The first version had one arm and found the stigma correctly 85% of the time. This one gets 92.8%.

The part I like best isn't the robot. The team uses gene editing to make male-sterile plants whose stigmas stick out further, so the robot has an easier time seeing them and reaching them. So they're not just building a machine to suit the plants. They're editing the plants to suit the machine. I hadn't come across that idea before, and it's already running in a greenhouse.

Source: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-geair-2-robot-crop-pollination-apac-china/