With startup Zordi, founder Gilwoo Lee's enthusiasm for robotics, healthy eating, better produce and sustainable farming has taken root.
Lee hadn't even finished her Ph.D. in AI and robotics at the University of Washington when investors seeded her ambitious plans for autonomous agriculture. Since researcher-turned-entrepreneur Lee founded Zordi in 2020 with Casey Call, formerly head grower at vertical farming startup Plenty, the robotic grower of strawberries has landed its fruits in Wegmans and is now expanding with partner farms in New Jersey and California.
The most rewarding part is that the fruits you get taste amazing, said Lee. You're able to consistently do that throughout the cycle of the plant because you are constantly optimizing.
The company has two types of robots within its hydroponic operations. One is a scouting robot for gathering information on the health of plants using foundational models. The other is a harvesting robot for delicately picking and placing fruits and handling other tasks.
Zordi, whose engineering team is based outside Boston, has farms in southern New Jersey and western New York. The company uses NVIDIA GPUs in the cloud and on desktops for training everything from crop health models to those for fruit picking and assessing fruit quality.
Lee aims to deploy autonomous greenhouse systems globally to support regional markets, cutting down on the carbon footprint for transportation as well as providing fresher, better-tasting fruits grown more sustainably.
Having operated greenhouses in New York and New Jersey for two years, the company recently formed partnerships with greenhouse farms in New Jersey and California to meet growing demand.
Zordi is bringing NVIDIA accelerated AI automation to indoor growing that in many ways is parallel to developments in manufacturing and fulfillment operations.
Adopting Jetson for Sustainable Farming, Energy Efficiency Zordi is building AI models and robots to enable sustainable farming at scale. It uses NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin modules for testing out gathering sensor data and running its models to recognize the health of plants, flowers and fruits, early pest and disease symptoms, and the needs for hydration and nutrition, as well as light and temperature management.
Jetson's energy efficiency and the availability of low-cost, high performance cameras from NVIDIA partners are attractive attributes for Zordi, said Lee. The company runs several cameras on each of its robots to collect data.
Jetson opens up a lot of lower-cost cameras, said Lee. It lets us play with different cameras and gives us better battery management.
With its scouting and harvesting robots, Zordi also aims to address a big issue farms worldwide complain about: a labor shortage that affects operations, leaving fruits and vegetables sometimes unattended and unharvested altogether.
Zordi is planning to scale up its growing operations to meet consumer demand. The company expects that it can do more with AI and robotic automation despite labor challenges.
We want our harvesting robots to do more dexterous tasks, like pruning leaves, with the help of simulation, said Lee.
Omniverse Isaac Sim and Digital Twins to Boost Operations Zordi is looking at how to boost its indoor growing operations with AI much like industrial manufacturers do, using Isaac Sim in Omniverse for simulations and digital twins to optimize operations.
The company's software platform for viewing all the data collected from its robots' sensors provides a live dashboard with a spatial map. It offers a real-time view of every plant in its facilities so that it's easy to monitor the production remotely.
What's more, it analyzes plant health and makes optional crop care recommendations using foundational models so that inexperienced farm operators can manage farms like experts.
We're literally one step away from putting this all into Isaac Sim and Omniverse, said Lee, whose Ph.D. dissertation covered reinforcement learning and sim-to-real.
Zordi is working on gripping simulations for strawberries as well as for cucumbers and tomatoes to expand into other categories.
With strawberries or any other crops, if you can handle them delicately, then it helps with longer shelf life, Lee said.
Lee is optimistic that the simulations in Isaac Sim will not only boost Zordi's performance in harvest, but also let it do other manipulation tasks in other scenarios.
Big picture, Zordi aims to create a fully autonomous farming system that makes farming easy and profitable, with AI recommending sustainable crop-care decisions and robots doing the hard work.
What's really important for us is how do we automate this, and how do we have a thinking AI that is actually making decisions for the farm with a lot of automations, said Lee.
Most recent headlines
05/01/2027
Worlds first 802.15.4ab-UWB chip verified by Calterah and Rohde & Schwarz to be ...
04/08/2026
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, t...
04/07/2026
April 7 2026, 19:00 (PDT) Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway Opens in...
01/06/2026
January 6 2026, 05:30 (PST) Dolby Sets the New Standard for Premium Entertainment at CES 2026
Throughout the week, Dolby brings to life the latest innovatio...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
30/05/2026
Zero in on one that says yes (and no)
Andy Marken May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Hero image courtesy of Deposit Photos
For content creators the most difficu...
29/05/2026
With InfoComm 2026 just weeks away, NDI is giving attendees plenty of reasons to...
29/05/2026
Reaffirming a partnership that has defined Canadian sports broadcasting since 19...
29/05/2026
Mobile/tablet is No. 2 device for watching TV, suggesting that the sports-production industry needs to take another look at the format
Ring Digital's Sprin...
29/05/2026
Berliner Ensemble, one of Berlin's five major theater companies, has expande...
29/05/2026
Solid State Logic will showcase its new compact, fly-away TCA Tour audio product...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, passed away last month on April 12 ...
29/05/2026
Paramount+ will be the English-language U.S. home for Barclays Women's Super...
29/05/2026
Further strengthening its virtualisation strategy to fully support broadcasters ...
29/05/2026
Swiss broadcaster Canal Alpha has deployed Harmonic's award-winning, software-based XOS Advanced Media Processor to modernize playout operations across cant...
29/05/2026
PTZOptics will showcase a new generation of intelligent video workflows at InfoComm 2026, June 17-19, Las Vegas. Visitors to booth N8227 will see how PTZOptics ...
29/05/2026
Arizona's Family has launched the Arizona's Family Sports (AZFS) streaming app, a new direct-to-consumer destination for live, local sports. The app is ...
29/05/2026
Starting in 2027, DAZN will be the exclusive home of The Canadian Football Leagu...
29/05/2026
Comcast Business has detailed the advanced network infrastructure it has deploye...
29/05/2026
In two-day event, leaders from academia and industry explored solutions to chall...
29/05/2026
The Basketball Tournament (TBT), now entering their 13th year of competition, ha...
29/05/2026
Roku has launched FOX One as a Premium Subscription on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Roku customers can now subscribe to FOX One using their Roku account for liv...
29/05/2026
In its sixth year, the broadcaster's coverage has become a global brand and ...
29/05/2026
Ratings Roundup is a rundown of recent ratings news and is derived from press re...
29/05/2026
The days are getting longer, the temperatures are rising, and playlists are filling up for the season. With summer around the corner, Spotify's global edito...
29/05/2026
New retro-inspired MPC announced
There are few devices that have gained the status held by Akai Pro's MPC range, and in recent years, the company have s...
29/05/2026
Save up to 30 on acclaimed titles
Following a successful launch at Superbooth 2026, Bjooks have revealed that they will be continuing the Kickstarter campa...
29/05/2026
Binaural monitoring application improved
Genelec have just released an update that brings some powerful new features to their HRTF-based binaural headphone ...
29/05/2026
6 June 2026 at SAE Institute, London, UK
IMSTA FESTA 2026 is almost upon us, with some of the biggest names in pro-audio set to descend upon SAE Institute i...
29/05/2026
Gerald (Jerry) Pierce, a pioneering technologist who helped shape the digital transformation of the motion picture industry, died April 12, 2026, at his home in...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Comparing 5 AI Video Enhancers for Restoring Old Video Quality
Kate Luvis May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Digitizing VHS, MiniDV, and other legacy formats doe...
29/05/2026
Studio Hamburg Builds New Post Pipeline with DaVinci Resolve Studio
Brie Clayton May 29, 2026
0 Comments
Workflow replaces a patchwork of legacy tools...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
Share
Copy link
Facebook
X
Linkedin
Bluesky
Email...
29/05/2026
At the Intersection of Music and Dance, an Epic Collaboration Boston Conservatory musicians and dancers found creative parallels in their recent performance o...
29/05/2026
May 29 2026, 09:00 (PDT) Dolby and rednote Bring More Immersive Storytelling to...
29/05/2026
Something fundamental has shifted in how people consume media. Audiences aren't abandoning television or radio content; they're just expanding how, wher...
29/05/2026
Youtube exclusive special drops today
Watch now
UKTV today announces another e...
29/05/2026
Back to All News
The Official Trailer of Physical 100 Italy, on Netflix From Se...
29/05/2026
At just 20 years old, Sean Melia from Summerhill Co. Meath has been revealed as the winner of Super Garden 2026. Sean is the youngest ever contestant and winner...
29/05/2026
Experimental HIV vaccine achieves a long-sought goal In a first for the field, all non-human primates given a new series of vaccines generated antibodies capabl...
With startup Zordi, founder Gilwoo Lee's enthusiasm for robotics, healthy eating, better produce and sustainable farming has taken root.
