ATW22: Tuesday: SRC launches Tom v4 monitoring robot at REAP 2022

Agri-TechE REAP Conference, 8 November 2022: Small Robot Co (SRC), a British agri-tech start-up for sustainable farming, today announced the launch of its next generation Tom v4 monitoring robots. This is a major milestone: commercialisation to both farmers and corporates. This comes just five years to the day from SRC’s initial unveiling at Agri-TechE ’s REAP Conference 2017.

Tomv4 is rolling out onto 20 farms in November to deliver SRC’s first commercial services for Per Plant Farming. Services will roll out to a total of around 50 farms throughout the coming year, with additional farm services in Suffolk and Shropshire. Farmers can try out the service on as little as 20ha, without a costly machinery outlay.

Meanwhile, pending corporate customer trials include nutrient company Mosaic (NYSE: MOS), world-leading research centre James Hutton Institute and leading fresh produce company G’s Growers. Five corporate trials are pending for 2022-2023, with a further seven in negotiation.

The first Per Plant services from the Tom V4 monitoring robot will optimise farmers’ existing sprayer equipment to reduce costs and inputs, by treating only the problem areas. This is anticipated to cut herbicide applications by around 77%, based on 2021-2022 field trials, and fertiliser by an estimated 15%. The potential is for far greater savings.

Sam Watson Jones, co-founder and President of Small Robot Company, says that automated commercial service is the major step forward: “Small, lightweight robots protect the soil structure, and detect problems before they escalate. This enables targeted application of small amounts of treatment, reducing costs and protecting yields. Our business model has made the service accessible to farmers with as little as 20ha, without a costly machinery outlay.”

Dr Belinda Clarke, Director of Agri-TechE , comments: “The Small Robot Company was profiled in the REAP Start-Up Showcase five years ago and it has gone from strength to strength. It has worked closely with farmers to ensure the technology addresses a real-world challenge and it has received an enthusiastic response from the industry.”

Tom’s capabilities include precisely geolocated per plant data, precise plant counts, and extremely high-resolution plant images, with the opportunity for every field to become a trial plot. Tom V4 delivers a ground sample distance of 0.28mm per pixel, among the highest resolution of any crop-scanning technology. This gives Tom the capability to see individual water droplets on leaves and early signs of disease outbreak.

Tom Jewers, a farmer and contractor in Suffolk who signed up to the services for the 2022-2023 season, comments: “We desperately need to develop ways to reduce the need for expensive plant protection products and artificial fertilisers. The ability to treat only the plants that actually need it is game-changing.” Tom is also on the SRC farmer advisory board, taking a lead in co-designing SRC’s robotic service.

The service comprises three scans targeting:

● Winter wheat crop count and Per Plant visualisation
● Weed detection, geolocation and per plant imagery
● Glyphosate treatment sprayer export: green on brown map for targeted glyphosate application
● Herbicide treatment sprayer export: variable rate nitrogen application maps using plant counts and biomass assessments
● Fertiliser treatment sprayer export: variable rate nitrogen application maps using plant counts and biomass assessments

Tom V4 scans the crop to a level of detail that identifies individual plants, gathering data on plant and weed distribution to determine the optimum treatment path. This information is used to inform variable rate fertiliser applications and to spot-apply herbicides through nozzle control and sectional control sprays.

Tom V4 can successfully identify all the wheat plants, determining precise plant counts, as well as broadleaf weeds. Tom accurately geolocates and analyses data on every plant in the field with 6m camera coverage, and 8 x 6 megapixel cameras, gathering 15,000 images from its cameras, or 40Gb of per plant intelligence, for every hectare.

Tom v4 is also a major technical advancement: Tom’s new modular design is also the basis for Dick and Harry. SRC’s new modular robot architecture enables its robots to share 80% of the hardware, 90% of the electronics and all of the deployed software. This platform will allow SRC to scale internationally to cover much larger farms.

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