New Photo Robot Helps ISU Researchers Learn About Corn Leaf Angles

By Dar Danielson

Professor Lie Tang says the leaf angles play an important role in how the plant captures sunlight, but it’s hard for a photographer to get pictures with thousands of plants growing together. “Some of them can grow more than ten feet tall. And you want to capture the angles from bottom to the top in a very tight space,” Tang says.

Tang is a professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering and says they developed a system with multiple tiers of cameras that are customized to work together. “We have binocular vision or stereo vision, just like our human beings who have two eyes. So we can perceive the world in three-dimensional space. It’s the same kind of principle, we even have two cameras through something we call the matching between two cameras,” he says.