March 13, 2018 

Blue River Technology’s Dr. Matt Colgan explains his team’s research to congressional staff. 

Yesterday, ARPA-E hosted its annual Hill Showcase, where five project teams demonstrated their novel technologies and discussed the future of American energy innovation with congressional staff.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Dr. Christer Jansson and Blue River Technology’s Drs. Matt Colgan and Chi Ngyuen joined the showcase to discuss their TERRA project, The Consortium for Advanced Sorghum Phenomics (CASP). The TERRA program aims to integrate agriculture, information technology, and engineering to address major global challenges in developing crops that are sustainable, affordable and yield feedstocks for bioenergy. The team is developing robots and imaging platforms to enable faster and more accurate data collection for plant analysis. In 2017, John Deere acquired Blue River for its expertise in applying computer vision, machine learning, and robotics to agriculture.