The Farmbot team on the roof with their larger robot. From left to right: Ghaz Shahbaz, Kevin Lin, Sophia Xia, and Rachel Ng.

Hunter CSCI Professor Susan Epstein, along with CCNY Professors Zihao Zhang, Christian Volkmann, Zhigang Zhu and Hunter students Kevin Lin, Rachel Ng, Ghazanfar Shahbaz, and Sophia Xia (class of 2022), have begun robotic farming on the roof of a building at City College. They expect their first small crop of lettuce, spinach, radishes, and herbs before the first frost. This intercollegiate project demonstrates how AI can impact urban food supplies and presents exciting challenges for AI research in reasoning, computer vision, natural language, and the integration of sensor data with communication to develop robots that collaborate with their human leaders. It is funded by a CUNY Interdisciplinary Research Grant.