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FIELD ROBOTS ▶▶▶


Robot manufacturers too often view their ro- bots as just a tool carrier, where farmers ex- pect a complete solution for a certain prob- lem. This makes introduction of robots to the market difficult.


Field robot market lacks direction and collaboration


T BY MATTHIJS VERHAGEN


he technology is fascinating: a robot that removes volunteer potatoes and weeds from a plot of beet or onions without any human intervention.


Lightweight robots require no labour, exert ex- tremely low pressure on the soil, and are able to work accurately 24 hours a day. And while building a high-tech solution onto a 45-metre spray boom is prohibitively expensive, it is per- haps feasible on a robot with a 2-metre spray boom. Start-ups and robot firms are seeing op- portunities in the global billion-euro crop protection industry.


Hardly ever used in practice In practice, development is a lengthy process and there are some failures. The list of robotics projects that never or have not yet made it into practice is long. As soon as the innovation grants are used up, the free market proves


The first field robots entered the fields over ten years ago now. Despite this, you rarely see them used in farming practice, if at all. If nothing changes, they will soon be overtaken by autonomous tractors with smart tools.


extremely tough. For a start-up without equity, there is nothing in sight but the financial chasm. In the meantime, crop farmers are very sceptical in view of the coming and going of robot manufacturers; after all, if you invest, you want to be sure that the supplier will still exist in five years time. This has also created a nega- tive perception of businesses that do have a sound concept. The extreme difficulty of developing a field ro- bot is evident in a company such as Amazone. Ten years ago, the manufacturer presented its Bonirob field robot. Amazone has since moved the management of the project to a start-up operating under the renowned Bosch brand. Even so, the robot is still not available on the


market. This is characteristic of a market in which robot projects fail to reach their predict- ed point of market launch, time and again. This makes the market very difficult to predict. The fact that field robots never get off the ground contrasts with the success enjoyed with robots in other sectors. Consider, for ex- ample, the milking robot or the packing robot used by egg farmers, but also robotic mowers on lawns, welding robots in industry, and ro- bots in logistics. Robots broke out of the realm of science fiction many years ago. However, a field robot is trickier to develop because it works outdoors under conditions that vary each time, and that creates complexity. Techni- cally, a robot is never allowed to work


▶ FUTURE FARMING | 27 August 2019 33


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