00:00The Philippines is the third largest producer of bananas in the world, so to help farmers,
00:17a mobile robot system was built that can detect diseases in banana trees.
00:23Come on, let's change the game!
00:25A robot that can go around hectares of land to map the area.
00:36A program called computer vision that can see trees.
00:43And it can also detect different kinds of diseases.
00:47That's the Roamer, or Robot for Optimized and Autonomous Mission Enhancement Responses.
00:56It's a grand component of the ASIMOV program, or Autonomous Societally Inspired Mission-Oriented Vehicles.
01:03Developed by DOST Advanced Science and Technology Institute last 2023,
01:09it was made to help the agricultural land, particularly banana plantations.
01:15Why banana plantations?
01:18Because DOST wants to address the problem of fusarium wilt,
01:23or fungal disease that can damage crops.
01:30We pivoted the project to agriculture because we need food every day,
01:35so it will be more lucrative.
01:39We want to have an automated solution that can help improve the productivity of the banana industry.
01:47The project was funded by 24.8 million pesos,
01:50where artificial intelligence, or AI, played a major role in the programming.
01:56Instead of telling the computer what the plant looks like,
02:01you give it a data set.
02:03Then it will study and find patterns on what the fusarium wilt looks like.
02:13This is Project Roamer, and it's ready to collect data.
02:17But before that, let's explore the different parts of it.
02:21We can see the wheels, perfect for different surfaces and different terrains.
02:26This is the LiDAR, and this is solely for area mapping.
02:31This is the camera, this is for the disease detection.
02:35We have a modem on the back, just for robot communication.
02:41Project Roamer is ready to roll.
02:49After Roamer rolls, it throws all the data it can collect.
02:55This is the app that our developers use to study the information.
03:00After just one project in a laboratory environment,
03:03Roamer was able to test in banana plantations.
03:07It's another game-changing and revolutionary invention in the agricultural sector.
03:12Aside from helping our farmers,
03:15it also shows the benefits of using artificial intelligence.
03:21For GMA Integrated News, I'm Martin Aviar,
03:24Changing the Game!
03:30www.gma.gov
