Small Robot Company raises £50k.
- Autor:Ella Cai
- Solte em:2018-07-18
The Small Robot Company, the Shropshire developer of agricultural robots, has raised £50,000 on Indiegogo.
The company aims to make farms more profitable, and increase yield and efficiency, through using small robots instead of tractors.
Its arable farming robots Tom, Dick and Harry enable farmers to be kinder to soil, kinder to the environment, more efficient, more precise and more productive. It will also reduce chemical usage and cultivation energy in arable farming by up to 95%.
Small Robot Company’s £50,000 funding will enable it to commercialise Harry, its digital planting robot. Harry recently won a prestigious Horizontal Innovation™ Award from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC) to develop the prototype technology.
Harry will accurately place seed individually in the ground at a uniform depth to within 2cm accuracy, creating a plant level map showing the location of each seed. By punch-planting rather than ploughing, Harry will also radically reduce soil run off and associated water pollution.
“We are reimagining farming in the robotics age. With this funding we can get our Harry robot into the field, bringing us closer to our goal of creating a sustainable farming system,” says co-founder Ben Scott-Robinson. “We want to digitise farming, making it more efficient and productive. The current ‘big farming’ monoculture model is broken, and exacts a terrible cost on our environment. With our robots, we can care for each plant individually, with no waste. We can feed the world without costing the earth.”
The company aims to make farms more profitable, and increase yield and efficiency, through using small robots instead of tractors.
Its arable farming robots Tom, Dick and Harry enable farmers to be kinder to soil, kinder to the environment, more efficient, more precise and more productive. It will also reduce chemical usage and cultivation energy in arable farming by up to 95%.
Small Robot Company’s £50,000 funding will enable it to commercialise Harry, its digital planting robot. Harry recently won a prestigious Horizontal Innovation™ Award from the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC) to develop the prototype technology.
Harry will accurately place seed individually in the ground at a uniform depth to within 2cm accuracy, creating a plant level map showing the location of each seed. By punch-planting rather than ploughing, Harry will also radically reduce soil run off and associated water pollution.
“We are reimagining farming in the robotics age. With this funding we can get our Harry robot into the field, bringing us closer to our goal of creating a sustainable farming system,” says co-founder Ben Scott-Robinson. “We want to digitise farming, making it more efficient and productive. The current ‘big farming’ monoculture model is broken, and exacts a terrible cost on our environment. With our robots, we can care for each plant individually, with no waste. We can feed the world without costing the earth.”
