This $1K Robot Will Keep Your Plants Alive for You

Keeping all your plants alive and happy can seem like a full-time job. Too much sun and some plants will completely shrivel up; not enough light and some start dropping their leaves or turning an alarming shade of yellow. And while it would seem that neglect is the most common cause of indoor-plant death, it can in fact be the exact opposite. Watering your plants everyday may seem like just the thing a doting plant parent should do, but overwatering is one of the very reasons your indoor plants might be dying.

If you’re tired of watching your plants die or attending to them non-stop, you’ll be pleased to know some genius has invented a robot to do it all for you. Meet Hexa, a six-legged, spider-like robot designed to transport your indoor plants on its back while it chases the sun or retreats to the shade as needed — especially handy for keeping your house plants alive while you’re away!

While Hexa won’t water your plants for you, it will do a little dance to let you know they’re thirsty. That means no more over watering!

Tianqi Sun, Vincross CEO and inventor of this clever little robot, designed Hexa to give plants more freedom and possibly a better chance of survival.

“Plants are passive. Eternally, inexplicably passive. No matter if they are being cut, bitten, burned, or pulled from the earth, or when they lack sunshine, water, or are too hot or cold, they will hold still and take whatever is happening to them. They have the fewest degrees of freedom among all the creatures in nature. This is simply the default setting that nature gives to plants,” Sun posted in a forum titled “Sharing Human Technology with Plants.”

While we love the idea, there are a few things about Hexa that are deterring us from actually getting one: the $949 price tag, the fact that it would never be able to carry a fiddle leaf fig, and that you’ll have no one to blame but yourself if your indoor plants keep dying.