Trabotyx robot for weed removal in carrot
The mission: Let the carrots grow!
To grow and harvest carrots, weeds are removed from the field. Especially in the early growth stage of the carrot plants, they are vulnerable to overgrowth by weed.
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To remove the weed from the carrot field, in an ecological way, it requires a lot of labor ... each individual weed should be taken out by the hand. This takes roughly 75 to 200 hours per hectare per growing season. In order to help out here on labour-availability and cost-efficiency, Trabotyx developed the robot weeder.
Hardcore AgriTech with action at plant-level
The robot weeded from Trabotyx is leveraging on an hightech approach: to automatically locate the weed amongst the carrots. Cameras are mounted to observe. Computing power is onboard to decide. And optimization of the decisions can be done online.
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Removal of the weeds take place with a 'drill'. Per row of carrots, two 'drills' are available. And per robot, two rows of carrots are done. The carrots rows at the photos have a row width of 75 cm.
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The entire set-up is electrical powered, already with easy swappable batteries.
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Simple, where possible
Although the weed-detection and plant-level-action is high tech, the Trabotyx robot does not 'breath' overcomplexity.
Where possible, Trabotyx seems to keep it simple. This 'simplicity' is perhaps exactly a proof of expertise. Trabotyx leverages significantly on 3rd party proven solutions. Having a set-up with different 3rd party components, may enable rapid development in the upcoming years.
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One operator, multiple machines at sight
The machines are currently able to run autonomously, with the turning at the headlands done by the operator. One operator is aimed to supervised these two robots.
In a later phase, one operator is expected to supervise more robots at once. During the making of this video and photos, the robots showed a steady practices: The robot operator had no interference from unexpected actions of the robot. This enables the operator to spend his or her time on the weeds that are missed by the robots.
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With two machines in the field, Trabotyx weeded multiple hectares at different customers in 2023 season.
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