because the agriculture sector is so important for us as a human being
to survive.
Back to 2016,
there was a very famous event in the U.K..
There was lots of news report about the huge labor
shortage in the agriculture sector, and it didn't make me thinking maybe
some technology years that we developed in the automotive industry can be.
transferred into agriculture industry.
I realized, oh my gosh, it's not only the labor
shortage, the growers the farmers are facing.
So many different pressures.
instead of to make it a bigger machines we make much smaller much lighter machines
but because we have the capability to make it autonomous
so we make many of these, So in that way we are more like ants, each individual
one is small, not that super powerful, but we have a fleet of ants.
We can really work together to do lots of work Our relationship with growers
has been vital.
You know we didn't have an agricultural background so we relying on them to,
show us how they grow, to show us that current problems.
they want to grow more sustainably,
And at the moment they don't have that many tools available
so that relationship for us has been so important
they're realizing that, you know, that
the future has to have robotics, there for future generations.
we have been always thinking about automation and we've done
a lot of automation with our systems we using, for example,
different sensors in the bags controlling the climate
as much as possible, but we haven't done much in terms of actual robots
the current project is UV treatment of the plants
and hopefully fingers crossed have it all treated with UV instead of
chemicals.
so we've reduced our herbicide use to zero.
So we don't use any herbicides.
And now the last element of the pesticide so left is the fungicides.
UV kills bacteria and fungus but we have to get it right
to actually help the plant if we are successful in this project,
we can proudly say we would be,
you know, offering to the market the pesticide free produce.
our mission is to make these robotics, automation and digitization
for everyone, not just before, not being a commercial farmers,
but also for small or medium sized farms.
so platform on its own, you could technically say
is the core product itself.
Then we have a logistics platform which is a assist
function essentially Assist is primarily meant to help harvesting
They spend about 20% of their time walking
from where they've just picked fruit to where they just drop it off
and they would prefer to be spending that time picking because that's
where the where the money's made.
In terms of other products, insights we're looking to really reduce the waste,
For example, at the moment currently inaccurate scouting methods,
they can have way more fruit than they realized,
So we're looking to give them that data as early as possible.
through that collection of data at a scale,
if there's areas of low productivity, low yield
the AI can find those areas and the farmer can have a look and see why.
The most important for us is the actual Antobot Platform
which we can, you know, put many other attachments
and with the same platform and everything, we could do multiple jobs.
from a farmer's perspective or our and users perspective,
they don't necessarily want the robots to be pretty,
but they do want the function and they want the durability.
They, they don't necessarily want to think about the robots on a daily basis
other than that it's doing what it's meant to be doing.
one thing that's really unique about our software is the modularity of it.
So because we've built everything on top of our robot platform, you can
sort of swap in and out hardware bits But still the core part is the same.
we really pride ourselves on having it be compatible with different modes,
different applications and different services.
biggest challenge is sometimes going into a field
like this, for example, not knowing what to expect,
not always having your requirements set correctly
or not set at all also we often find problems in the fields
that we weren't even aware of before we came here.
Its always a bit of a
who gets the first go whether we make changes in software
to make up for hardware limitations or the other way around.
in terms of interacting with the mechanical team,
we always need the robots to be functioning well.
have all of the hardware that we need on board and we need it to be robust.
having used SOLIDWORKS it does make things easy.
It's a very intuitive software to use.
It's it's easy to make changes to designs we could come here today, have an issue,
go back straight away, design something new, and then come back tomorrow
with a new part already.
It makes the process very fast for us, which in this industry is very important.
So for us this is essential
otherwise that
we could not together these beautiful robots out.
Yeah, I think it's a SOLIDWORKS Start up program on
its is excellent a perfect the program for us
because we as a startup, we have a limited resource.
We really need someone to help us to get on with our design so we can
we already feet on the ground and it kept running
we were basically in a position where we had a project
but we needed 3D software and sort of had a quick look around
and then came across this startup program from Solid Solutions
for a very young startup at that point as well, especially being so
Capital Limited, if you will, being able to have full package
free of charge for the first year was brilliant and also solid Solid
Solutions and SolidWorks
don't really throw the startups into the deep end after that either.
So they do help you out
in the following years as well Opportunities in this domain.
We found that it's huge at it's a moment that we would like to focus
in the UK market because it we found the UK is as we already
you innovative the agritech space even beyond Europe.
because this problems, is another UK.
or Europe unique is global.
Even countries like China we consider it's like a country
with a huge of a labor force But as we are heading into the labor growth crisis
very shortly there's no young people getting into this industry either.
We can imagine
there will be a huge labor shortage and the demands for agricultural robots
So this would be also the future markets we would expand the into as well.