WESTERN PRODUCER — An Australian company that seeks to revolutionize farming by replacing large, human-operated equipment with smaller autonomous robots has created machines that can resupply themselves with chemicals without assistance.
The new ability of SwarmFarm Robotics’ equipment to “dock and refill” eliminates a key bottleneck in the technology’s development, said chief executive officer Andrew Bate. The company’s lightweight machines can only carry small payloads of chemicals such as herbicides compared to manned equipment.
“If you look at how the robots are being used at the moment, if they run out of product at three o’clock in the morning, there’s no one there to fill them,” he said.
“We’ve opened up huge amounts of operating hours with autonomy because we can run around the clock 24-7, but… if we are going to have these lightweight machines, they’ve got to be able to fill themselves up to get to that next step.”
Efforts by the agriculture industry to maximize efficiency and productivity through conventional manned machinery has resulted in equipment that can do several things, including carrying large payloads. It has allowed producers to maximize the number of acres that can be farmed in a day by a human operator.
However, Bate said such equipment is not only becoming prohibitively complicated and expensive but also massive and unwieldy. A fully laden combine can weigh as much as 36 tonnes, resulting in problems ranging from soil compaction and erosion that can significantly reduce crop yields to difficulty manoeuvring across farmland.
“Some of the tires that go on combines now, the combines are so heavy that you can’t get rated tires that can handle the weight, therefore they’re moving to rubber tracks to try to handle that weight,” he said.
“None of this increases yields. It’s all about how many acres a man could do in a day. Once you’ve moved to autonomy, that’s no longer relevant anymore because it’s not about how many acres a man can do in a day. It’s about how do we farm better?”
It will be interesting to see how robotics will change agriculture, Bate said. “I mean, are we just going to automate the existing harvester? Probably not. I think when we see autonomous harvesting, it’s going to be different to how we’re doing it now.”
It represents an opportunity to reinvent farm machinery and rethink how it can be used “because once you’ve got autonomy in robotics, you don’t have to do everything at once,” he said.
He pointed to how combines brought together activities such as swathing and threshing that were once done separately, hence the name, combine.
“We might actually see robotics going backwards to swathing crops and then threshing them later, all sorts of things, so it won’t be a direct replacement … with a lot of these field operations, and that’s the thinking that’s going to change with robotics.”
As someone who farms 11,000 acres in the northeastern state of Queensland in Australia, Bate went down the path of “really large equipment” before becoming disillusioned.
“It got to the stage where we realized that as we got bigger and bigger tractors and combines and sprayers, we didn’t farm as well as when we had smaller equipment 20 years ago, and so, SwarmFarm was kicked off (in 2012) with the vision that if we went to robotics, we can have smaller, lighter machines that were simpler — that would grow better crops than what we’re doing with large equipment.”
Bate described his company’s approach as integrated autonomy, which involves wheeled robots weighing about two-and-a-half tonnes that act as platforms for other technologies.
“We don’t build sprayers, we don’t build planters, we don’t build fertilizing equipment. We just build the autonomous robots and then other companies integrate their technology on board.”
Farmers can control the machines, which operate at about 86 horsepower, using a simple app on their smartphones, said Bate. The machines can work together as a swarm or fleet on tasks ranging from weed detection in fields to slashers and mowers for orchards, he said.
“Look, I think our biggest customer has three. At this stage, it’s a scalable technology. I mean, there’s no reason we couldn’t have 10.”
By being smaller, the machines are more affordable, said Bate.
“If you look at the latest technology now, and the size of cheque you have to write up to buy the latest farming technology, it’s pretty big,” he said.
“I think what robotics is going to do is kind of democratize or open up the opportunities for smaller farmers to get the latest technology because they can buy smaller pieces of it in a robot, and larger farms will have the same technology and just have more pieces of it, so it’s going to be pretty interesting as well with adoption of technology.”
SwarmFarm Robotics’ equipment is being used by Australian producers on more than two million acres, Bate said.
“It’s not hard to drive multiple states across Australia and see our robots running commercially on farmers’ fields around the country.”
Bate spoke via Zoom on Sept. 19 from Salinas, California, where he was attending the three-day International Forum of Agricultural Robotics.
SwarmFarm Robotics recently brought its first robot to North America and plans to take it on tour before the winter, “and we’re quite interested to see what level of adoption we can get over here in North America,” he said.
About 85 percent of the company’s machines in Australia are being used in combination with weed detection technology, he said.
“They just spot spray individual weeds and because of that, payload size hasn’t been a concern because we use so much less herbicide when we’re using that technology.”
However, the ability to dock and refill creates the potential to expand to things such as blanket spraying of fungicides and insecticides, as well as fertilizing, seeding and planting.
“It also opens up an ability for us to start looking at things such as harvesting as well,” Bate said.
“Once again, if we’re going to try to make machines really simple and lightweight, they can’t carry huge (amounts) of grain on board, so this allows us to minimize weight and start opening up new areas like crop harvesting in the future.”
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