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A robot for real-time soil nitrogen and soil quality assessment, enhancing crop management and sustainability. Fully autonomous robot designed from ground up to be affordable.
About
Autodiscovery is a Field Robotics System Integrator working on Embodied Intelligence.
We are the UK's fastest growing robotics company aiming to solve physical intelligence in robots and be the leading provider of affordable mobile robots.
In the journey to this ambition we are working on several R&D projects specifically selected in areas where robots are useful and affordable with the current level of technology. While eventually autonomous robots will be able to accomplish many tasks in our society initially want to maximise the benefit to early adopters of autonomous robots. One of these key applications is in-situ affordable soil quality monitoring.
Key Benefits
Robot enabled climate action.
The innovation titled 'Soil quality monitoring robot', which is the development of the first robot-enabled machine vision tool known as N2Vision and calibrated direct soil probe, provides significant benefits in the realm of agricultural technology. This sophisticated device utilizes novel imaging sensors observing the crops and correlating nitrogen levels in soil and plants, enhancing the precision of soil probes. This technology could significantly improve nitrogen use efficiency. Its ability to accurately measure soil nitrogen content is vital for maintaining the economic viability and environmental health of farming operations. In contrast to traditional nitrogen detection methods, which are costly, require a significant amount of labour, and are time-consuming, the N2Vision offers a much more cost-effective and scalable solution that yields actionable insights at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Even daily measurements are possible at 0.1 m resolution. The developers collaborate closely with farmers in the UK and Vietnam to ensure the robot is immediately beneficial and seamlessly integrates into existing farming practices, signifying a leap forward for crop management and agricultural sustainability.
Applications
Soil is at the heart of agriculture. Soil is not well understood and monitoring it at scale is expensive and not affordable. Autonomous affordable soil quality monitoring effects all of agriculture however initial focus should be high value crops such as cacao, coffee, grapes, cotton and more.
Initially the technology has been validated on wheat and cacao. More data will create a more generic model that can be applied to other crops.
1 robot is targeted at sub $10K, can monitor 5 Ha per day at high resolution and can work together with other robots easily. Robots can be re-charged from solar power. Robots are fully IP67 all weather. Robots are zero maintenance and have an expected lifetime of minimum 5 years however it is likely robots can operate longer then this with some maintenance.