Meet Vinobot, the Rover on a Mission to Help Feed Humanity

[Narrator] This is how a robot sees corn.

And trust me, we want as many robots

looking at corn as we can get.

Because humanity has itself a problem.

It can't stop growing.

By 2050, an estimated nine billion people

will cover the planet.

Compounding matters is global warming,

which threatens to throw agriculture into disarray.

But what humanity also has are robots, and robots are legit.

Like this one from the University of Missouri.

It's on a mission to help build corn

that can weather the ravages of global warming.

And here are its eyes in the sky.

This tower builds a 3-D model of a field,

scanning the landscape for stressed corn plants.

Then it dispatches our autonomous robot

to any problem areas.

This rover does a more thorough scan of the plants,

constructing finely detailed 3-D images.

It also samples humidity, temperature and light intensity

at the top, middle and bottom of the plant.

The idea is to determine how drought and heat

affect the yield of different kinds of corn.

With that data, scientists could one day develop corn

that fares better on a rapidly transforming planet.

See, told you robots are legit.