A fully autonomous solar-powered lightweight weeding robot, using AI for plant recognition, precision contact and contactless weeding methods suited for hard soils, hilly terrains and arid climates.

Introduction

Fighting weeds is one of the oldest problems of agriculture. The current solutions include mass use of herbicides, mechanical tilling, or manual weeding.

Environmental Impact of Current Solutions

Herbicides are poisons that kill not only weeds but also pollute the soil and water, bringing lasting damage to all living organisms, including the health and well-being of humans.

Mechanical weeding with standard agricultural machines (ICE-based) adds to CO2 emissions, damages and compacts soils, and is very imprecise.

Manual weeding is back-breaking, often dangerous, and low-paid work for which there are fewer and fewer candidates.

Our Solution

Our solution addresses all these environmental, economic, and health problems together. It will also strongly support the expansion of organic agriculture in Europe, which is facing much more difficulties with weed pressure compared to conventional farming.

Our innovation is specifically designed to target the needs of the most climate-vulnerable farmers – those from the semi-mountainous regions of Southern Europe.

Technical Specifications

We offer a fully automated solution in the form of a 4-wheeled rover, featuring:

• In-wheel integrated electrical engines
• Solid X-Y-Z wheel synchronization
• Front-steering mechanism

The rover is lightweight and solar-powered for a 24-hour working cycle.

AI and Weeding Methods

The robot uses AI based on deep neural networks to spot weeds among desired plants. It can effectively destroy weeds using:

1. Contact (mechanical) methods
2. Non-contact (energy beam) methods

These methods depend on both weed size and type, as well as soil and weather conditions, without creating any fire hazard in the process.

Navigation and Future Potential

Finally, our robot can self-navigate in and around the fields, achieved without costly RTK equipment. This is done by combining multi-GNSS (including Galileo) receivers and cameras with proprietary algorithms.

The robot has huge potential to expand its capabilities by adding sensors for soil and weather tracking, etc. We can also grow our offer by supplying vast plant and field data analytics and predictive analysis to farmers and other potential clients.