CAMBRIDGE, Mass — These gardeners would have green thumbs — if they had thumbs.
A class of MIT undergraduates has created a team of robots that can water, harvest and pollinate cherry tomato plants.
When the plants indicate through soil sensors that they need water, the robots sprinkle them. When the plants have a ripe tomato, the machines pluck them.
Each plant and robot is connected to a computer network. The plants can alert the network when they need fertilizer, while the robots use seeing-eye high-tech cameras to inventory the fruit yield.