Behind the Beijing Expo: The Beauty of Horticulture Brought by Technology

The Beijing International Horticultural Exhibition opened grandly on April 28.

The 2019 Beijing Expo is the highest-level and largest international expo held in my country after the Kunming Expo, the Shanghai World Expo and the first China International Import Expo.

The World Horticultural Exposition, also known as the World Horticultural Festival, is the highest level of professional international exposition. The exposition brings together the best gardens and horticulture products, exotic flowers and plants from various countries, aiming to promote the exchange of world culture, while integrating cultural and scientific achievements to bring the most grand audio-visual feast to the participants. The exhibition usually lasts for 6 months, from late spring to mid-autumn festival.

Different from the previous 37 sessions, the Beijing Expo is**The first 5G-supported Smart Expo in history.**In the park, visitors can deeply feel the beauty of the integration of technology and gardening.

The park is full of smart devices, unmanned mobile vending machines, unmanned boats, big data and visualization services. Visitors can also experience the VR drone flight experience system and overlook the beautiful scenery of the Expo through VR technology.

**With IoT and 5G as the "nerves" and big data and artificial intelligence as the "brains",**This Expo allows visitors to experience the beauty of the integration of technology and nature.

In fact,Gardening and artificial intelligence have long intersected.

When AI meets gardening

Horticulture is a cross-industry between art and planting.Garden Art, refers to work related to the garden, including tools, techniques, technology, and craftsmanship.

Horticulture includes gardening, the planting, breeding art and production and processing of fruit trees, vegetables and ornamental plants.

The development of horticulture depends largely on the careful management of plants or crops by workers.**Behind the beautiful and elegant gardening shapes are often the workers’ hard work and efforts.**For example, workers need to monitor growth, eliminate diseases, irrigate, and transport crops. When faced with huge amounts of horticultural production, this workload can be overwhelming.

So, artificial intelligence could no longer sit idly by and decided to rescue the gardeners.

In fact, the path to take is very simple. Use robots or mechanical equipment to replace labor.**Machine learning, AR and VR technologies,**To monitor and regulate the plant production environment.

In the examples that have been reported, many solutions are already working, such as using sensors and the Internet of Things to analyze and monitor data, using fine-tuned soft robotic arms to help with labor, and creating precise weed control machines and state-of-the-art packaging tools.

Gardening Expert No. 1: BIGTOP

For potted cultivation, after planting, it needs to be fertilized and watered until it reaches the right size, then it can be pruned and trimmed for sale.

For example, nursery shrubs need to be moved an average of four times during the entire growth process from germination to sale to provide the best space for maximum growth. This care process is very labor-intensive and may cause thorns from plants such as roses.

For this purpose, AIS (Advanced Intelligent Systems) has developed a gardening robot BIGTOP. It is an autonomous transporter equipped with a robotic arm that can move the gardening robot in the correct position.Carrying and relocating potted plants.

Equipped with a navigation system and object recognition function, BIGTOP can not only carry things, but also sort and arrange potted plants according to requirements, and even automatically count and dispatch the inventory and distribution of a certain plant.

Of course, this robot is more than just a mover; it can also**Computer vision technology,**Inspect and monitor the health of your plants.

After that, it can use the cloud system to send pictures of sick plants to gardeners, who can diagnose based on the photos and send corresponding countermeasures to the robot. At the same time, if it "detects" that a plant is too lush, BIGATOP will prune it accordingly.

Gardening Expert No. 2: Herbot

A company called Kickstarter launched a**Herbot, the artificial intelligence indoor gardener,**This is a rectangular box with transparent glass walls that makes gardening management smart. With Herbot, you can grow your favorite plants anywhere.

This smart gardening robot is capable of being used in any climate, automatically feeding, watering and providing adequate light to plants through an app-controlled system.

In addition, you can**Learn from user preferences to grow organic foods and herbs in an efficient way.**At this point, all people need to do is select plant seeds, put them into the Herbot box, and then they can be a "free gardener".

In addition, Herbot is compatible with smart home devices and has Google Assistant, an HD live camera, and an LED touch display built in. You can interact with the plant, ask Google for recipes, and make cool time-lapse videos of the plant's growth.

Herbot also has a high-definition live camera that allows you to see real-time information about your plants. Basic information such as temperature and water level can be quickly checked on the display.

Gardening experts sit in a row

The above are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other schemes that are playing a role in the horticultural industry in various aspects.

**water:AGardenSpace static robot, which can automatically water plants on demand,**It only needs to be connected to the Internet and powered by solar cells to provide a reasonable watering plan based on the plant information and track the health data of each plant, such as chlorophyll levels and the temperature of the plant and soil.

The best part is that it can also act as a "security guard". The robot is equipped with a dynamic sensing 360-degree camera, which can spray water to drive away animals when they illegally break in. The corresponding application can even tell the order in which crops should be planted, which is quite considerate.

Weed control:There is also a German company called Bosch, which has invented a weed remover that can quicklyBoniRob, a robot that kills weeds faster than workers and herbicides.

Equipped with a camera and a navigation vehicle, BoniRob moves through the fields, using image recognition technology to identify weeds, then taps them twice a second with a 1-centimeter-wide drill bit so that the weeds don't overtake the crops.

Artificial Intelligence Transforms Traditional Gardening

With the development of technology, technology is playing an increasingly important role in gardening. Perhaps those traditional methods of cultivating plants will gradually fade out of the stage of history.

But in terms of design and aesthetic modeling, garden designers may still have a strong advantage.

Now when we make a work of art, we don’t have to spend a lot of time waiting and cultivating the prototype, which may be the biggest reward.

Next time, when the World Horticultural Exposition is held in China, perhaps a large number of robots will be "recruited" to work!

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