Phenobot UGV

Phenobot is a custom built UGV for plant phenotyping. Plant phenotyping is an emerging science that links genomics with plant ecophysiology and agronomy. The functional plant body (phenotype) is formed during plant growth and development from the dynamic interaction between the genetic background and the physical world in which plants develop. Nowadays, only very skillful highly educated agriculturists are dealing with phenotyping. For this reason Phenobot has been designed and manufactured to satisfy the requirements of the Cyprus Institute of Agriculture.  

Phenobot has the ability to plant autonomously, under real weather conditions, a variety of seeds in a specific pattern to form honeycomb design, in field plot. In this way agriculture scientists can observe the growth of each plant individually but at the same time the honeycomb design ensures comparable growing conditions through large number of plants.

Because of Phenobot, Helikas Robotics is a stakeholder in a pan-European infrastructure for multi-scale plant phenotyping, called EMPHASIS.