Edible barcodes, DARPA’s modified crops, insects, Pivit Bio raises $70M, rice straw ethanol, renewable concrete, automated indoor farming, biobased hairstyling, silkworms making spider silk: The Digest’s Top 10 Innovations for the week of October 17th

#7 Iron Ox outfits the first automated indoor farm

In California, leveraging advancements in plant science, machine learning and robotics, Iron Ox launched the world’s first autonomous indoor farm focused on increasing the availability, quality and flavor of leafy greens including romaine lettuce, butterhead lettuce, and kale – as well as culinary herbs including basil, cilantro, and chives.

“At Iron Ox, we’ve designed our entire grow process with a robotics-first approach,” said Iron Ox co-founder and CEO Brandon Alexander, who previously worked at robotics lab Willow Garage and later Google X. “That means not just adding a robot to an existing process, but engineering everything, including our own hydroponic grow system, around our robots.”

For the average indoor farm, tasks like harvesting, seeding, and plant inspection are happening thousands of times a day. These labor-intensive, repetitive tasks are perfect for robotics, so by integrating machine learning and computer vision, Iron Ox enables robots to respond to an individual plant’s needs.