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51 pays for the delivery of a healthy crop for X amount per hectare. That moves farmers away from the traditional capital expenditure model of paying upfront for costly machinery and offers instead a service based on the operating costs. To do that, the company is developing technologies that will support the use of autonomous systems as a service, delivered to a farm when needed, rather than having to buy dedicated hardware that can be more expensive than the manned version (and which the farm already has). The other issue is weight. Tractors can weight up to 30 tonnes, and using a heavy tractor to spread fertiliser and weedkillers compacts the earth. This compaction reduces the yield of the crops that cannot grow in the hard soil, and needs far more ploughing each year to break up the soil. Up to 95% of the energy used on the farm goes into ploughing, says Scott-Robinson. Using lighter systems to address the precise needs of the crops – whether it’s planting the seeds, applying water or fertiliser, or removing weeds – reduces the impact the machinery and chemicals have on the land and helps to improve yields. This combination of a new business model and a need for lightweight systems led Small Robot to develop two interrelated systems that work together. A lightweight, highly mobile ground vehicle called Tom will be used around fields, and it will use AI to analyse images of the crops and identify areas that need attention. A larger robot system, based on a chassis called Harry, is then brought in to address these problem areas, applying fertiliser or removing weeds for example. Another version, again based on the Harry chassis, is used to plant the seeds in the spring. The main focus is on wheat, which is a particular challenge. Wheat seeds are small and irregular in shape compared to corn or other crops, and that brings engineering challenges in the design of the planting system. Tom is designed to be installed permanently at the farm, and to be low cost so that it can be bought or rented by the farmer. Kennel base It is stored in a ‘kennel’ plugged into the power grid to charge while not in use. It also includes a wireless connection, either to the farm’s wi-fi or a cellular link. This is used to upload the data collected after Tom has toured around the fields. From the kennel, which could also be powered by solar or wind power, the small robot would cover five to 10 fields of around 200 hectares. The system keeps track of the health and development of each plant, taking a picture with a visible-spectrum camera and a near-infrared sensor, and noting the position using a GNSS satellite navigation module with a real-time kinetic (RTK) add-on that provides positional accuracy to within 2 cm. This is necessary to identify individual plants. The RTK system uses a transmitter on the kennel to deliver correction data to Tom as it travels around, ensuring that the position data on the images is correct. Tom also takes a picture of weeds growing around the plants as The Small Robot Company | Digest The main focus is on wheat, whose seeds are small and irregular in shape compared to other crops, bringing design challenges Unmanned Systems Technology | October/November 2018 Testing out a prototype of the Tom autonomous monitor