The seemingly invincible march of technology was recognised at the 2022 National Ploughing Championships 2022, with the National Ploughing Association (NPA) award for Machine of the Year going to the FarmDroid autonomous robot.
The machine was developed in Denmark and has been working in the fields over there for several years. It is now being imported into Ireland by IAM Agricultural Machinery in Co. Kilkenny.
Rapid success
The idea for an autonomous machine to relieve the task of manual hoeing of organic beet crops came to the two brothers, Jens and Kristian Warming, both mechanical engineers by training, in 2011.
The idea was slowly developed over the next few years and the story goes that the long suffering wives of the enterprising duo eventually told them to take the project to market, or drop it.
This spurred them to find a financial backer who was experienced in industrial robotics and the first commercial machine was launched in 2018.
Four years later, the company now employs 60 people and there are over 300 machines working in the field throughout Europe.
A different approach to autonomy
While other projects aimed at bringing autonomy to the farm have failed to take off, the secret of the FarmDroid is that it does not rely on cameras or plant recognition software.
Instead, as it plants a seed it simply remembers where it is, to an accuracy of 8mm, and then it can weed between both the rows and the plants themselves.
This basic approach has enabled it to leapfrog ahead of the opposition and establish itself as a viable autonomous field machine that works, and is proving itself to be economically viable, rather than remaining a dream in the eyes of a development team.
Using its own RTK base station, the machine will faithfully place the seed along a prescribed base line with a manually set row spacing and variable plant spacing, which is set from the accompanying app.
Growing beyond organic farming
The company recommends that one machine will tend 20ha taking around four days to sow the area and then weeding every week or so.
One of the advantages of relying upon GPS only, is that it can control weeds before the crop emerges, a feature not available on vision based systems.
One other notable advantage is that root crops tend to be a lot more uniform in size, meaning that there is a great deal less wastage at the packing station.
Presently the system is targeted at organic farmers who can reduce the cost of manual labour through using the FD20, but the company can see it being used in conventional farming as well, with maize being one crop that is very likely to benefit from autonomy.
For safety purposes the machine works to standards that are now generally becoming accepted as suitable for unsupervised machines, the main feature of which is a speed of operation that does not exceed 1km/h.