Small Robot Company (SRC) announced its first commercial robot, ‘Tom’, earlier this week.
Launched by the UK agri-tech start-up on Thursday (April 29), the Tom monitoring robot is now delivered to commercial specification and entering service on UK farms.
According to the firm, its 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, which it dubs as “a world-first milestone”.
This is now in field trials, 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.
SRC claims that “with up to 95% of chemicals wasted in the current farming system, this new non-chemical weeding technology will be significantly more nature-friendly and better for biodiversity”.
In future, Tom will also gather data from multiple sources, such as sensors and microphones for birdsong and pollinators, to assess soil health and biodiversity, the firm says.
Manufactured in Northumberland, England, by Tharsus, Tom will also be going into 5G trials in Dorset in the autumn in the £8 million (€9.21 million) 5G RuralDorset project.
Tom will cover 20ha per day autonomously, collecting about six terabytes of data in an eight-hour shift, and detecting millions of data points per field.
As an example, Tom collected 12.7 million plants in a single 6ha field, of which 250,000 were identified as weeds.
Wider agri players
Tom’s scanning and measurement capabilities are also applicable to lots of wider players in the agriculture industry, the company says.
The new mapping service “offers highly accurate and repeatable measurement of crop data, with the opportunity for every field to become a trial plot”, SRC claims.
With trial plots yielding as much as 20t/ha of wheat, versus the average of 8.4t/ha on UK farms (and averages around 7.9t/ha on Irish farms), there is considerable opportunity to improve performance, the firm asserts.
SRC is currently conducting a pilot, with its Tom robot taking soil samples to assess soil health measurement.
Robotic monitoring could provide accurate, repeatable carbon measurement at farm scale.
This, SRC argues, could be transformational in providing accurate carbon sequestration measurement to support UK farming’s transition to Net Zero by 2040.
Tom – the details
Tom is now delivered to commercial specification, ready for ramp up of the service to more than 100 farms in 2023.
Other claimed benefits from the mapping service include yield predictions, measurement of herbicide efficacy, and giving farmers the ability to take “no spray” decisions with confidence.
The first crop for the service is wheat, with the next phase being multiple crop types. It has also just started a project to be able to detect disease in wheat.
Also being piloted is SlugBot, working with partners Crop Health and Protection (CHAP), in which Tom uses hyper-spectral cameras to detect slugs at night, and then treat them biologically with microdoses of nematodes.