Small Robot Company launches first commercial robot
Small Robot Company (SRC), a British agritech start-up for sustainable farming, today announced its first commercial robot, ‘Tom’. The Tom monitoring robot is now delivered to commercial specification and entering service on UK farms. Customers include the Lockerley Estate, where robots are a key part of its regenerative farming strategy, as well as Waitrose & Partners and the National Trust.
SRC’s first service using Tom will be per plant weeding, a world-first milestone. This is now in field trials (see demo video), with Tom scanning first arable crops to detect weeds, and robot weeding prototype ‘Dick’ then zapping individual weeds with electrical ‘lightning strikes’, using no chemicals. On-farm pilots of the service will commence this autumn.
Thu 29 Apr 2021 01.00 EDT
In a sunny field in Hampshire, a killer robot is on the prowl. Once its artificial intelligence engine has locked on to its target, a black electrode descends and delivers an 8,000-volt blast. A crackle, a puff of smoke, and the target is dead – a weed, boiled alive from the inside.
It is part of a fourth agricultural revolution, its makers say, bringing automation and big data into farming to produce more while harming the environment less. Pressure to cut pesticide use and increasing resistance to the chemicals meant killing weeds was the top priority for the farmers advising the robot company.
UK made: Small Robot Company reveals its first commercial robot
Hampshire start-up Small Robot Company has revealed Tom, its first commercial robot, designed to pinpoint weeds using camera.
Tom with SRC president and co-founder Sam Watson Jones
Manufactured in Northumberland by Tharsus, initial customers include Lockerley Estate, Waitrose’ Leckford Estate and the National Trust.
“SRC’s first service using Tom will be per-plant weeding,” according to the company. “This is now in field trials, with Tom scanning first arable crops to detect weeds, and robot weeding prototype Dick [
below left] then zapping individual weeds with electrical strikes.”
Tom and Dick use and an artificial intelligence engine called ‘Wilma’ to identify individual weeds, with Dick using ‘RootWave’ non-chemical weeding equipment mounted on three Igus delta robotic arms.
Killer farm robot dispatches weeds with electric bolts msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Small Robot Company
At Lockerley estate a robot called Tom is making its way slowly but steadily through 650 hectares of arable farmland. Weighing just 150 kilograms, the autonomous robot travels on four wheels, splashes of orange on its 1.8 metre long metal frame. Fixed out in front, at the end of Tom’s long crane-like lever, a powerful double camera scans each individual wheat plant poking out of the Hampshire soil.
Each day the robot, designed by UK start-up Small Robot Company, can travel up to 20 hectares in this way, collecting around six terabytes of data on exactly which patches of wheat might be blighted by weeds – a problem that, if left unchecked, can see whole fields of crops destroyed. Once Tom is finished, it’s the turn of Dick. A spider-like bot armed with a five-pronged “death wand” Dick can electrocute every single weed detected with a small puff of smoke, and zero chemicals.