Gadgets
fromZDNET
18 hours agoI let a smart planter maintain itself while I was away for 2 months - here's the result
The LeafyPod is a smart planter that simplifies plant care with app support and a rechargeable water reservoir.
Qi Sun's DrayEasy platform exemplifies a significant advancement in logistics, merging quoting, booking, and real-time tracking into a seamless automated experience for shippers.
In the past, roof inspections mostly focused on what could be seen from the outside. Contractors looked for broken shingles, worn flashing, or areas where water might enter the roof. The problem is that roof damage does not always show clear signs right away. Water can move through roofing layers before it becomes visible inside the home.
Our customers, ranging from large enterprises to AI research labs, are no longer just asking for AI features. They need a way to collect high-fidelity, synchronized robot and vision data to train AI models on the same robots they intend to deploy. Our AI Trainer is the industry's first direct lab-to-factory solution for AI model training.
I came out here and I found the Coco in my garden. It had got my fence caught up in its wheel. It uprooted a whole bunch of [plants] in my garden and then just drove away with the fence attached to it.
It can drive through the field and look at every square inch. We really honed our craft on model performance and detection with rocks, and now we've transitioned that into weeds. The robot uses a boom-mounted camera system to capture detailed imagery across the field. With eight cameras operating at 1 millimetre resolution, TerraScout can generate billions of data points per acre, allowing it to identify specific objects, including individual weeds.
You can go onto your cloud account either through the iPad or your desktop computer and pre-plan all your jobs... when your hired man goes into the field he can just pick the job... and then hit start and you can go.
All of the appliances and systems are brand-new: the HVAC, the lighting, the entertainment. Touch screens of various shapes and sizes control this, that, and the other. Rows of programmable buttons sit where traditional light switches would normally be. The kitchen even has outlets designed to rise up from the countertop when you need them, and slide away when you don't.
Enter the LeafyPod, a self-watering smart planter that utilizes AI to understand your leafy companions, and keep them well cared for. The system is simple: a connected app monitors hydration and nutrient levels, noting what's best for that specific type of plant. Recently named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025, the hydroponic system allows users to grow herbs, greens, or flowers all year long. LeafyPod is adaptive, responding to plant health and to changes in environment.
Yaghi describes AI not as a silver bullet, but as an advanced form of statistical pattern recognition-tools that can identify trends in data that may be difficult or time-consuming for people to uncover on their own. The real opportunity, he says, depends heavily on what farms are already doing. Operations that are consistently collecting and digitizing high-quality data are better positioned to benefit, whether the goal is lowering per-cow costs in a dairy, improving financial analysis, or identifying operational efficiencies.
Picture this: four robotic arms working in perfect harmony, tracing circular patterns like some kind of futuristic dance performance. But instead of creating art, they're printing the walls of an actual farm. Welcome to Itaca, a project that just wrapped up its construction in the hills of Northern Italy, and it's changing how we think about building homes. WASP, the Italian company behind this audacious venture, just finished printing the walls of what they're calling the first certified 3D-printed construction in Italy.