Meet Bruno: The AI Robot Revolutionizing Bean Breeding in Uganda

To breed resilient, productive, and nutritious bean varieties, accurate, efficient, and cost-effective data collection is essential. Traditionally, breeding programs depended heavily on human observation, sometimes supported by mobile data collection apps. But, manual phenotyping is time consuming, labor intensive, prone to error, and slows down selection cycles and drives up costs of breeding.

In early 2025, researchers at the Alliance Bioversity International and CIAT’s Uganda office began field testing an innovative phenotyping robot named Bruno, which automates the phenotyping process into a fully digital workflow. It uses standard Android smartphones with the custom ONA data collection app. Bruno is moved through experimental plots while its cameras take detailed images. These images are uploaded to a secure cloud database, analyzed using artificial intelligence (AI) models, and breeders can access quantified phenotypic data, such as plant stand counts, flower emergence, and pod counts.