Farming robots around the world

New Zealand’s apple vacuum

Kiwi food producer T&G Global lacked the workforce to pick apples, so US startup Abundant Robotics stepped in with a solution: a robot driven by Lidar – one of the technologies that lets driverless cars “see” – with machine vision to spot ripe fruit and a vacuum arm to pull apples from trees gently, without bruising.

Floridian strawberries

Harvest CROO Robotics wants to pick the world’s strawberries, with its Berry 7 robot able to pull aside leaves, inspect fruit and pick fresh berries. The robot replaces 30 pickers, the company says, and is able to harvest eight acres a day at a rate of eight seconds per plant. The technology is still in the trial phase, but is in use at Wish Farms in Florida.

Kenyan weed killer

A pair of students at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology have developed a

tiny robot that roams farms to kill weeds without herbicides, which can be poisonous to farmers. The robot, which uses an AI vision system from Microsoft, is trained with images of the healthy crop and the likely weeds, before heading to the fields to rip out weeds with a small robotic arm.

Israel’s flying farmers

Tevel Aerobotics, an Israeli robotics company, is addressing worker shortages with a high-flying idea: tethered drones that fly to the tops of trees to pluck fruit, before returning to earth to gently place them in baskets. The drones aren’t tethered for safety reasons, but to provide power – as a result, battery life isn’t a problem.

Canadian crop platform

Dot Technology was founded in Saskatchewan,

Canada, but recently snapped up by US robotics company Raven. Why? The Dot is a U-shaped driverless vehicle that allows key farming equipment to be attached, such as a seeder or harvester. The aim is to fill workforce gaps and to help farmers spend less time driving and more time farming.