AI robot spots sick flowers to slow spread of disease in tulip fields
NOORDWIJKERHOUT, Netherlands — Theo works weekdays, weekends and nights and never complains despite performing hours of what, for a farm hand, would be backbreaking labor checking fields for sick flowers.
The robot — named after a retired employee at the WAM Pennings farm near the Dutch North Sea coast — is a new tool for rooting out disease from the bulb fields.
On a windy spring Tuesday morning, the robot trundled along rows of yellow and red “goudstuk” tulips, checking each plant and, when necessary, killing diseased bulbs to prevent the spread of the tulip-breaking virus. The dead bulbs are removed from healthy ones in a sorting warehouse after they have been harvested.
The virus stunts growth and development of plants leading to smaller and weaker flowers. It also weakens the bulb itself, eventually leaving them unable to flower.
As part of efforts to tackle the virus, there are 45 robots patrolling tulip fields across the Netherlands as the weather warms and farmers approach peak season when their bulbs bloom into giant patchworks of color that draws tourists from around the world.
In the past, that was work carried out by human “sickness spotters,” said Allan Visser, a third-generation tulip farmer who is using the robot.
“You could also buy a very nice sports car,” for the price of the robot, Visser said Tuesday — its makers say the robot costs $200,000.
“But I prefer to have the robot because a sports car doesn’t take out the sick tulips from our field. Yeah, it is expensive, but there are less and less people who can really see the sick tulips,” he added.
It’s a lot slower than a sports car, rolling on caterpillar tracks through fields at 0.6 mph hunting out the telltale red stripes that form on the leaves of infected flowers.
“It has cameras in the front, and it makes thousands of pictures of the tulips. Then it will determine if the tulip is sick or not by its AI model,” Visser explained, calling it “precision agriculture.”
“The robot has learned to recognize this and to treat it,” he added.