Agriculture is still an integral part of the modern world. However, traditional farming methods put a lot of pressure on the environment. Fighting pests and diseases through herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals negatively impacts soil, water, and biodiversity.
The development of technologies, including artificial intelligence, data collection and analysis tools, high resolution images, innovations for precision farming, contributes to making effective decisions and increasing the sustainability of agriculture. Robotics also enables farmers to improve productivity while reducing the burden on the environment. This kind of solutions help automate many processes and attract large-scale investments. In this article, you’ll learn about startups that create robotics solutions enabling agriculture to become more efficient and sustainable.
Weedbot
This agtech startup offers to make organic farming easier with their precision laser weeding technology. Weedbot was founded in 2020 and has raised €190,000 in two funding rounds. The company collaborated with the AI platform. During the collaboration, a neural network was created that can recognize images of plants at a rate of 12ms per second. It is a sustainable way to control weeds, using laser beams for their detection and removal, avoiding pesticides application.
Clarifruit
The software offered by Clarifruit gives you the ability to control the quality of fresh food throughout the supply chain with an automated end-to-end solution. This startup was created in Israel and attracted $6 million in investments. This product can help marketers, producers, and retailers improve the production and distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables. Clarifruit’s big data and analytics platform allows users to set their own quality assurance and quality control process standards. In addition, data collection enables users to obtain information to improve work efficiency and productivity.
SwarmFarm
It’s no secret that the larger the area of agricultural land, the more people will be required to work on them. Due to bad weather conditions or poor harvests, the cost of manual labor is on the rise. However, farmers in large enterprises can also use big robots to get the job done faster and more efficiently.
Robots help automate labor-intensive processes and improve agricultural productivity. Australian startup SwarmFarm is developing a big SwarmBot robot. It is pretty versatile and can work on a large farm and garden. The robot destroys weeds and reduces the number of herbicides used. In addition, SwarmBot can be used to prepare the soil for sowing.
Small Robot Company
Farmlands in many countries are small and difficult to reach for big robots. For this reason, farmers have to put up with delays in harvesting, using human labor. However, there are also robotics solutions for small farms. More miniature robots are more practical and can work where only humans can typically get to. The Small Robot Company is a UK-based startup developing three small robots to automate specific tasks. Robot Tom monitors the soil and crops. Dick is in charge of weeding the crops, while Harry is responsible for planting the seeds.
Agranimo
This agtech startup provides a solution to reduce waste when sourcing fresh produce. Agranimo promotes automation technologies that increase the sustainability of consumption. Over the years of research, the company has accumulated a lot of knowledge in farm management. The startup uses this knowledge to implement agronomic and IT innovations.
Final thoughts
Today, there are a lot of outstanding startups in the field of robotics that offer various solutions for agriculture. These innovative solutions help to automate many agricultural operations and make production more sustainable. Farmers can choose a robot based on their farm size and entrust it with essential tasks, including sowing seeds, detecting, removing weeds, and more.
