this is a nano drone, one that we are working on in our lab. it has a processor and camera and we can build our software and make it fly autonomously. >> reporter: using these tiny flying computers, these scientists are training it to perform several tasks. >> what we're trying to achieve here is to make the environmental monitoring and the plant monitoring autonomous and more smart. what we do, we take these tiny drones in the size of the hand and we let them fly around so that they can measure any point, any height, any angle, any type of environmental sensor reading. >> reporter: the emergence of artificial intelligence has covered a pivotal moment in their research. today they are teaching the nano drone to recognize different objects like identifying certain fruits. using ai and computer vision, it is able to recognize that this is a banana. what kind of information is it gathering? >> most of all it is gathering images so then you can feed it into an ai that can tell you, oh, it is ripe, we can pick the plants. and also it is checking for