a little over two years later public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (guess why they don’t have a bounty for the new name), just graduated from the X “moonshot” lab.
“After five years of incubating our technology at Alphabet’s moonshot factory, X, Mineral is now an Alphabet company,” CEO Elliott Grant said in a statement. a blog post“Our mission is to help scale sustainable agriculture. We are doing this by developing a platform and tools that can help collect, organize and understand what was never previously known or understood about information about the plant world — and make it useful and actionable.”
After years of trying to build a robotics division largely through acquisitions, Alphabet appears to be growing one organically internally.Minerals are as follows everyday robot and inherent Grow from X to a fully independent Alphabet subsidiary.
Mineral uses its in-house robots to create datasets and conduct research on different crops. It explained — over the course of its five (mostly secretive) existence — that it had found that most companies were doing a good enough job of collecting the range of data needed to leverage machine learning.
“There is no single mode of data collection that fits every agricultural task or crop,” Grant said. “We started with plant rovers that can capture large amounts of high-quality images, and expanded over time to build general-purpose perception technologies that can work across platforms, such as robots, third-party farm equipment, drones, sentinel devices, and mobile phones.”
The company’s ultimate goal is to create detailed and rich datasets that farmers around the world can use to unearth previously unknown planting factors. In doing so, it hopes to help grow crops that are more resilient to climate change without exacerbating pressing problems.
