In addition to being costly, herbicides can be harmful to the environment, so why use them on the entire crop instead of just the area where the weeds are growing? — That’s the idea behind the Solix Spayer robot, which finds and sprays weeds in farmers’ fields.
The Solix Sprayer was designed by Brazilian/American agri-tech company Solinftec and will be manufactured by Indiana-based McKinney. Like Solinftec’s existing Solix Scout robot – which inspects and reports on crops but does not spray them – it is powered by four onboard solar panels.
As the Sprayer moves autonomously back and forth across the planting field, it uses a set of integrated sensors to scan each plant it passes “from root to leaf. If the onboard Alice AI system determines that the plant is a weed, it selectively applies herbicide to it.
The robot also generates a digital map of the field and shows the location of detected and treated weeds.
According to Solinftec, a single Sprayer robot can manage up to 100 acres (40.5 hectares) of farmland per day, depending on the shape and topography of the field. In addition, by using a lighting system and batteries charged by its solar panels, Sprayer can operate 24 hours a day. And because the robot is much lighter than a tractor pulling a “smart” weed sprayer, compaction of the soil should be minimal.
In its current form, the Solix sprayer is optimized for use on cereal crops such as wheat, soybeans and corn, and Solinftec says the technology has been able to reduce herbicide use by up to 70 percent in U.S. trials conducted to date.
The machine is reportedly scheduled to be available for commercial use sometime next year.
