SPAIW

Consortium: FarmDroid and Danish Technological Institute (DTI)

Project Hashtag: #fieldrobot

Overview

FarmDroid is an innovative low-cost field robot that uses solar energy to autonomously keep row crops, such as beet or rapeseed, weed-free. The robot drives slowly, continuously hoeing the soil both between and within crop rows, as required by the First Open Call Agri-Food Challenge.

The concept is one robot per field, running almost 24/7 weeding its own area. Lightweight and organic, FarmDroid is a light-weight robot that weighs under 700kg. Due to its light weight it does not cause soil compaction and can be used on very light soils. It uses no chemicals, which makes it environmentally friendly and suitable for organic farming. It is also solar powered and CO2-neutral. Being solar powered, the robot is CO2-neutral when running and does not need recharging. When the battery runs out during the night (after about 7 hours from a full charge) the robot just stops and resumes when power is restored. When nights are short, the robot never stops. FarmDroid uses GNSS location data enhanced by RTK to first sow and then mechanically hoe crops such as beet or rapeseed, entirely autonomously. By using a local, fixed base station we achieve accuracy of around 2 cm, which we aim to improve during this experiment.