From clipboards to keyboards

Drs. Bidinosti and Beck in the TerraByte Lab — Dr. Chris Bidnosti (left) and Dr. Michael Beck with a prototype low-cost photogrammetry setup in the TerraByte lab. The technology has the potential to speed up and automate much of the time-consuming manual labour involved in plant science research.Caption

There’s a turntable in the University of Winnipeg’s TerraByte lab, but it’s for scanning plants, not spinning records.

“You put the plant on the turntable and the plant rotates and you take pictures from four different camera angles and then you can build up 3D models,” explained, Professor Bidinosti, in the Physics Department and co-founder of the Terrabyte lab, an interdisciplinary hub for research exploring machine learning applications in agriculture.

Located at the intersection of physics, computer science, biology, and engineering, TerraByte is opening up new career possibilities for students and is also one of UWinnipeg’s most successful research programs to date, attracting nearly $5 million in external funding since 2018.

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