April Data + AI User Group

You must register for this meetup here: **[https://forms.illinois.edu/sec/1032631545 ](https://forms.illinois.edu/sec/1032631545)**24-hours before the event if you wish to also have lunch.

For our April meetup, we will hear from Michael McGuire, Lead Computer Vision Engineer at EarthSense, Inc. Michael will present - "Five Years at EarthSense: AI and Vision in Agriculture"

EarthSense emerged as a response to several demands in the fields of agriculture and sustainability. Labor shortages, unsustainable farming practices, and climate change all pose threats to the future of global agriculture and the health of the environment. To remedy this, EarthSense has developed robotic solutions for high-throughput plant phenotyping, covercrop planting, fertilizer application, and more. At this event, Michael will focus on the challenges of achieving precise field monitoring and robot autonomy in outdoor environments, and the role of AI and computer vision in this endeavor. Join us as Michael, the Lead Computer Vision Engineer, reflects on five years of developing vision solutions, the progress their team has made, the lessons they've learned, and their plans for the future.

In this talk, Michael will describe the TerraSentia robot and how their team developed their state-of-the-art phenotyping algorithms. Next he will cover the challenges and solutions as they shifted towards autonomy for TerraPreta, their covercropping robot, and TerraMax, their oil palm fertilization robot. After that, Michael will provide a glimpse at their future plans for autonomy, generalized perception, and general-purpose outdoor robotics. Throughout the talk, Michael will demonstrate the central role of AI and innovation in their development. Finally, Michael will share the lessons learned over five years of developing these solutions, and his recommendations for best practices in deploying AI in the real world.