"Le petit prince" (the little prince) is a miniature greenhouse (concept) intended to walk a plant around Mars' surface in search of optimal growing conditions—elements from light to nutrients. Eventually the robot masters its environment, sharing growing tips with a whole swarm of bots plant-growing robots.
But the prince is not just a growing machine—the designer and 2009 Electrolux Design Lab finalist considers the bot first and foremost as a "pet" or "silent friend" to keep a colonist company. Of course, when the prince convinces you to come out for drinks on a Thursday night and he's hanging out with a group of old roommates from his factory days, well, its tough not to feel like a third wheel even if his intentions were sincere. [Tuvie via Treehugger]

Taste Test is our weeklong tribute to the leaps that occur when technology meets cuisine, spanning everything from the historic breakthroughs that made food tastier and safer to the Earl-Grey-friendly replicators we impatiently await in the future.

These 15,750 yen ($160) watermelons were grown by a couple and took three years to perfect down to the point where they were good enough to convince people to pay $160 for them. There's only 20 melons in this batch, but we're sure Mr. and Mrs. Hiroichi Kimura will grow more next season. [Asahi via Japan Probe via Inventor Spot via Boing Boing]

The Canna Chopper boasts odor and video sensors to find pot fields from the air, and on its first trip it rounded up seven outlaw farmers and several kilos of product, so looks like it's reasonably effective. Effective at being no fun. [Dutch Daily News via DVICE]

The suit, designed by the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, contains eight motors fitted over the shoulders, elbows, back and knees to give farmers the boost they need to pull radishes, lift haystacks and other farm work.

Though the current model is a hefty 35 kg, researchers say they can halve the weight and put it on the market in two years time. Each suit will retail for between 500,000 and 1 million yen ($5,600 to $11,200). Only in Japan, folks. [Japan Probe]

The CropCam is a self-guided GPS plane for keeping up with your crops. The farmer tosses it into the air, and the CropCam will fly around in a preset pattern around his fields, snapping precise stills marked with latitude and longitude of the ground below. The six pound plane can cover 160 acres per launch, which is enough for many a farmer, and is a quick option to assess distributions of disease and a convenient way to document growing progress year to year. There is farming in my blood and my grandpa lived for gadgety stuff. Of course, like many resourceful farmers, he'd probably try to rig one himself instead of spending the $10,000. I wonder if it would have worked. – Mark Wilson

Product Page [via redferret]