Robotics

Advanced Farm Technologies Inc is based in Davis California. It was founded in 2017 and has raised $9.2M including from Yamaha Motors, Kubota in Sept 2019.

FENDT has launched small mobile robots for swarm farming. The so—called MARS (mobile Agricultural Robot Swarms) system uses small robots operating in swarms and a cloud-based solution to plan, monitor and accurately document precise planting of corn.

Traptic was established in 2016 and has raised some $3.4M according to Crunchbase. They are based on San Francisco.

Change in AI approach: the company previously had utilized hand crafted algorithm with no self learning. It has now changed approach. This is because AI is easier, more flexible, and can cover more situations.

Dogtooth: robotic arm on an autonomous platform to pick fresh, grade and pack fresh berries

Carre: autonomous mechanical in-row weeding

Adigio: autonomous weeding machine with precision sprayer and DNN-based weed detection

Octinion is a Belgium based R&D firm helping design automated agricultural machinery. They have been accumulating experience since at least 2015.

Augen Robotics has raised $1.8million in funding thus far (July 2019). The company's founder previously worked on automation at CNH. At the time, he concluded that autonomy would come from start-ups, and not big companies.

IdaBot is developed at the Idaho-based Northwest Nazarene University. The goal of its first prototype is to autonomously navigate a vineyard using passive radio frequency tag (RFID) markers and demonstrate precision application of chemicals to grapes.

Researchers have discovered that certain crystals are more flexible and stretchable compared to current materials used for electronic applications. These new materials could therefore be used for making sensors and in robotics.

Product design: it is not autonomous. One supervisor drives the machine. The machine is designed to have 12 picking arms, 6 on each side. The picking arm can penetrate one meter into the tree and if the trees are 100 or 600mm inside and are visible the robot can pick them up.

Swarm Farm Robotics is based in Australia.

We caught up with Dr Roland Tschakarow of Deepfield Robotics, a Bosch start-up. Roland has decades of experience developing robotic systems. Deepfield Robotics is a corporate start-up.

Agrointelli is a Danish development firm working on automation in agriculture. It formally started in 2015. In the first year it wanted to be perceived as an innovation. Now, however, it is producing its own products.

Ecorobotix is an interesting agricultural robotics company located in the French border of Switzerland. It was established in 2014. The company was started by Steve Tanner who is today the CTO.

Agerris is a spin out from the Field Robotic Research group at University of Sydney. This is a very active and prominent group in robotics. The company has already raised $6.5 million (AUSD) in seed funding from Uniseed, Carthona Capital and BridgeLane Group.

They essentially are a spin out from the University of Illinois. They have $1M seed funding and 24 staff (6 employees and the rest part-time or students to drive down burn rate). They have working prototypes.

FarmWise is based in San Francisco and has raised $20M (there are 55 people now. Established in 2017). It seeks to offer to robotics together with AI-based services. Its tech roadmap is to go from autonomous weeding to plant-level farming data to autonomous farming.

Prior to this they had a history of fabrication as 'they always built their own sprayers for tractor pulled sprayers'. They claim that they always had more 'innovations for sprayers in house than the market had'.