Former iRobot employees cultivate new idea

At a meeting of the MIT Enterprise Forum on July 30, a company that includes two former iRobot employees announced that it's developing an autonomous robot capable of...organizing potted plants.

While that may sound like a strange and fruitless project to spend years working on, the robot actually fulfills an industry need that could end up making their Groton, Mass.-based company a lot of green, Harvest Automation CTO Joe Jones and CEO Charles Grinnell told me in a phone interview. (The company earlier was known as Q Robotics.)

Where's the big business in potted plants? Everything from conifers that grow in your yard to office houseplants are often started and grown in those same plastic pots you buy them in at the garden store or home repair center.

Space is a large preoccupation for growers. Too little space between potted plants and the plants grow into each other or develop black spots as they mature, making them unsellable, said Grinnell.

If too much space is left between them from the start, land or greenhouse space is wasted. And because many growers use sprinkler systems, fertilizer and water that falls into the gaps is also wasted, and that wastes growers' money. Growers also want to minimize the amount of fertilizer seeping into the ground and from there into water supply, said Jones.

Currently growers use manual labor with sticks and ropes to rotate the pots and measure the space between them as the plants grow.

The autonomous robot is about two years away from being commercially available, but the current prototype can pick up potted plants between 1 and 3 gallons in size. The waterproof and sun-proof robot can carry the pots around and line them up in organized grids based on a grower's specifications.

Harvest Automation's robots have global awareness through beacons placed around the perimeter of a given area, and communicate the way the iRobot Roomba communicates with beacons that tell it which rooms to vacuum. While the battery technology has not yet been decided, the types of batteries the company is looking at would allow the robots to work for up to 8 hours and take about 4 hours to recharge.