Yu Jiang
Appearances
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
For data crunching, I imagine. Well, I want to learn more about this robot. Like, does it have a name? This one specifically does not have a name. But as a whole, all of these robots are called phytopathologbots, or PBB for short.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
PBB, phytopathologbot. But also, I think from the engineering perspective, I love the acronym because it's short for parts per billion. Means super accurate.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
I mean, Emily, I can't give it all away. Let's just wait till after the break. Fair. Okay. So today on the show, the infections imperiling our grapes and the robots that could help farmers fight back. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
It has to do with crops and crop disease. Yes. So there's actually two types of diseases that growers are trying to tackle here. There's powdery mildew and downy mildew.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
This is Philip Lujan. He's a plant pathologist and assistant professor at New Mexico State University. And he's responsible for disease diagnostics for crops really throughout the whole state. He says these two diseases reduce the sugar content in these grapes. They make the grapes bitter and lower quality.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Even as little as 3-5% of mildew infection in a vineyard can make the entire grape crop unusable for wine production. An infection of this extent, it's been described by researchers as giving the wine an oily, viscous mouthfeel. Ugh, terrible.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Yeah, so these two diseases, downy mildew and powdery mildew, they're caused by two totally different organisms.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
No, not at all. Philip told me one is caused by a fungus and the other one is caused by a fungal organism. Kind of like a water mold. Okay. But the effect is low-key similar.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
And I see you've brought a friend. I have. This is the sound of a robot rolling down a row of grapes and diagnosing the problems in the grape prop.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
You can tell which leaves are affected because they're like flaky or dirty looking. Powdery mildew creates cracks or lesions in the grapes, and downy mildew makes them more shrivelly and discolored.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
And these types of mildew, they aren't just gross looking, they're also really bad for the plants and their grapes.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
And Emily, once that mildew sets in, it's really hard to shake. What do you mean? So Philip lives in New Mexico where downy mildew isn't as much of an issue, right? Because it's so dry. And that's true also in California, which is where the majority of U.S. grapes are produced. But he says that powdery mildew, the fungus spread disease, is capable of spreading anywhere.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
It can even overwinter, which means it survives through the cold season and then infects new leaves when it rains in the spring.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
I mean, it shows the tenacity of this fungus, respect, but also these poor grapes. Yeah, but grape growers are constantly working to combat this threat.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
It drives by itself, and while it kind of traverses through the vineyard, it takes the images of the grapevine canopy and starts to use the input image to identify the disease infections.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
That's exactly the analogy that Philip used to explain this to me. He said these grape diseases are developing resistance faster than we're developing treatments. And so for that reason, we need to diversify the methods that we're using.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
So if we don't want to use so many fungicides, the best thing to do is detect this mildew as early as possible, way before it becomes a problem. Right, treat it at the source. How do people go about doing that? So it's a really hard job, and it's usually done by skilled workers, right? People who are trained on how to spot these early stages of mildew.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
But they also have to be out in the field where there's no shade. They're walking down every row, and they're looking at each plant. And Yu Jiang from Cornell, he told me it can be really hard on those workers.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
I know many people are going to say, oh yeah, I'm going to enjoy the sunlight. But imagine you're going to work eight hours per day. For the whole year of your job, just being in the field.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Yes. And you need to check all these diseases we just look at around. You change your mind and you lose your passion.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
This is a job for the robots. They go up and down the rows and they scan all the grape vines, like I mentioned earlier. And they take hundreds of thousands of pictures to detect the presence of mildew. But Emily, even among all these hundreds of thousands of pictures, there's a problem. And it has to do with lighting.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Sometimes, you know, the image you're taking in the morning would look very different than in the evening, right? And that's actually caused a lot of problems later on for the AI models.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
And especially many of these disease symptoms are based on the color. So that illumination is going to be the biggest challenge for the color consistency or the image quality consistency throughout the day.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
So this is Yu Jiang. He's an assistant professor of systems engineering and data analytics for specialty crops at Cornell Agritech. Very long title. Super long title. But what it means is that he's the nationwide expert on grape robotics. And he and his colleagues at Cornell Agritech, which is in upstate New York, where I went to interview him.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
So to solve this problem of color consistency, they use flash for every single photo. It's like the grape robot version of a ring light. Nice. Well, they want that lighting to be consistent. So these robots, they roll down the row. They have their flash on. Yep. And they're taking a lot of photos. Two photos per second. They just sound like my parents.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
You see current to the robot kind of taking the picture. As I mentioned, once the picture is taken, it will transfer directly to the computer inside the small box.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
The computer then analyzes those photos and compares them to existing photos of diseased plants to make a diagnosis.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
And then the AI model will do the inference. Basically calculate how many pixels representing the infections versus how many pixels representing the canopy. And then after the scanning, it will generate the map to showing the infection severity at each geographic location.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
So basically what he's saying is that it creates this huge map of the grape field, right? Indicating both where the mildew is and how bad it is.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
It is super accurate. So we just kind of finished a study to further verify its accuracy in terms of a disease detection for various kind of disease in different states like California, New York, Western Virginia. And we found overall we achieved around, you know, over 90% of the accuracy for Downy Mildew, Pottery Mildew, and associated virus.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Mildew is detected. When they find it, they still have to treat it, right? So you told me that eventually they're hoping to equip these robots with sprays so that they can treat the infections directly out in the field when they find them. That's cool. Yeah. And he showed me the next generation of these robots. They use similar technology to a Tesla, so they're actually self-driving.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
And they have cameras on both sides so they can scan twice as fast as the original robot. You know, I said these robots were the cousin of WALL-E, but they're really the cousin of Eve. They're out here scanning plants to, like, protect nature. They're little eco-warriors or something. Absolutely. But he's working on other robots, too.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Most of them are stored in a huge barn when they're not working. Some of them are small, and they roll through the field and pull weeds. Some of them are huge, like eight or nine feet tall, and they zap mildew in the middle of the night with UV light. But all of them are meant to make human grapefarmers' jobs easier.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
And Emily, you know that not everyone is as excited about the robots as he is, right? These big robots that treat mildew in the middle of the night. He told me that one time the neighbors called the police because they didn't know what was going on.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
built this grape scanning robot i'm gonna send you a picture of that robot now emily and we can make it the cover image for this episode so our listeners can look at it too okay oh look at her go yeah it's like if if wally like from pixar had a baby with a floor lamp it's it's that's how i feel that this would look yeah exactly it's around five maybe a little over five feet tall uh-huh it's got wheels on the bottom and a camera on the side and then this kind of computer set up on the back
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
People just want to make sure everything is right. The operators kind of explained all the situation, but I think now people really understand, especially with years of these, you know, extension and outreach activities, people understand.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Yeah, like, is it aliens? What's happening? And the other concern that people have that you mentioned to me is, like, what if these robots take human jobs, right? Are they going to replace us?
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Many people think, oh, yeah, robots are going to replace humans. No. In my opinion, they're going to just complement, give us more capacity, more power, that we can do way more than Earth as an individual in the future.
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Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Yeah, exactly. And he's working with pilot groups, with farmers around Cornell, asking how they can make this technology work for them. Like the ultimate goal of these robots isn't to take our jobs. It's just to help us do them differently.
Short Wave
Grape Growers' Next Collaborators? Robots
Hannah Chin obviously did the fabulous reporting. Tyler Jones, check the facts. Zoe Vangenhoffen was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Hannah Chin. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.