This Waterloo tech company helps cricket farmers grow bugs for protein
CBC
Waterloo company Darwin AI has been recognized by a United Nations agency for its part in of one of the world's Top 10 outstanding projects.
They're part of a sustainability project developed by Aspire Food Group that uses artificial intelligence to help farm crickets as an alternative source of protein.
The tech will be used at a new state of the art facility set to open in London, Ont. this spring.
Sheldon Fernandez, CEO of Darwin AI, joined CBC Kitchener Waterloo's The Morning Edition to explain the role of their artificial intelligence software in the process.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
CBC Kitchener-Waterloo: How are crickets normally farmed and how will using artificial intelligence help improve that process?
Crickets are farmed in an ecosystem that closely mirrors the way they grow [in the wild]. You have outdoor farms, that you might envision in a tropical climate that are grown the way plants are grown.
This project is quite unique because we are creating along with Aspire Food Group, an entire enclosed system in London, Ontario, where we're replicating the ecosystem that is ideal to grow crickets.
Where artificial intelligence is really useful is looking at all the environmental factors such as moisture, temperature, the sounds of the crickets to determine how that environment has to be fluctuated to maximize cricket yield.
CBC Kitchener-Waterloo: Why is Darwin AI getting into the cricket farming industry?
We really have unique technology that enables artificial intelligence to be very trustworthy and to deploy it in places at the edges, they say.
At Darwin AI, our primary focus is applying artificial intelligence to manufacturing.
We have capabilities around visual inspection and looking at a lot of data and extracting irregularities or anomalies for that data.
For us, it was just a really interesting extension of our technology in an area that is developing all these interesting technologies, but applying them to living organisms was a real challenge.
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