More than two years later public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, formerly known as the “Computational Agriculture Project” (no prize for guessing why they took the new name), has just graduated from the “moonshot” X lab.
“After five years of incubating our technology at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory, Mineral is now an Alphabet company,” said CEO Elliott Grant. a blog post. “Our mission is to help scale up sustainable agriculture. We’re doing this by developing a platform and tools that help collect, organize, and understand previously unknown or unseen information about the plant world — and make that information useful and can be done.”
Years after trying to build a robotics division primarily through acquisitions, Alphabet seems to be organically developing an additional internal division. the following minerals Daily Robots and intrinsic in growing from X to a fully released subsidiary of Alphabet.
Mineral uses its in-house robot to create datasets and research on different crops. It explains that — during its half-decade (mostly stealth) existence — it has been discovered that most companies are doing a good enough job of gathering the range of data needed to take advantage of machine learning. .
“There is no one-size-fits-all data collection regime for every agricultural or crop task,” says Grant. “We started with a plant-based autonomous vehicle that can capture large quantities of high-quality images, and over time have expanded to building general cognitive technology that can work across platforms. such as robots, third-party agricultural equipment, drones, sentry devices, and mobile phones.”
The company’s ultimate goal is to create rich and detailed data sets that farmers around the world can use to exploit previously unknown factors in the growing process. In doing so, it hopes to help cultivate crops that are more resilient to climate change without exacerbating the pressing problem.
