Bandai Namco Research Inc. collaborated with Japan's National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) to develop an AI system that analyzes drone-captured aerial images of grassland to automatically evaluate grass characteristics for breeding selection—a task that previously required breeders to spend over two hours manually inspecting fields on foot.

NARO and Bandai Namco Research developed a deep learning AI model that processes aerial images captured by drones to classify and evaluate grass strains' characteristics for breeding purposes. The AI was trained by studying the evaluation techniques of skilled human breeders. According to NARO's official press release, the manual field evaluation process previously took over two hours per session; the AI-based method completes the same evaluation in approximately five minutes. A second related collaboration estimated legume coverage in mixed pastures using drone imagery, reducing a task that took more than three hours manually to approximately 2.5 seconds at equivalent accuracy.