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Sarah Dickinson
on 7 June 2019

Small Robot Company sows the seeds for autonomous and more profitable farming

AI case study robotics

In Europe, the cost of running a cereal farm – cultivating wheat, rice, and other grains – has risen by 85% in the last 25 years, yet crop yields and revenues have stagnated. And while farms struggle to remain profitable, it won’t be long before those static yields become insufficient to support growing populations.

Reliance on tractors is at the heart of both of these problems. Not only are tractors immensely costly to buy and maintain, they are also inefficient.

The Small Robot Company (SRC), a UK based agri-tech start up, is working to overturn this paradigm by replacing tractors with lightweight robots. Developed using Ubuntu, these robots are greener and cheaper to run than tractors, and generate far higher yields thanks to AI-driven precision.

In this innovative deployment of robotics and AI for commercial farming, you’ll learn:

  • How the agri-tech start up is using robotics to grow crops and reduce waste, including its current partnership with a leading UK supermarket chain.
  • The emergence of Farming as a Service (FaaS) business model, eliminating the need to invest upfront in expensive machinery
  • How the use of Ubuntu in the cloud and on the hardware powers SRC’s three robots – Tom, Dick and Harry – plus Wilma, its AI system, to accelerate development and provide a stable platform.

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