The farm-ng Amiga Max robotic is within the ultimate phases of improvement. | Credit score: The Robotic Report
Bonsai Robotics and farm-ng final week introduced a merger of the 2 agrobotics organizations. The mixed firm will function as Bonsai Robotics. I used to be invited to go to the farm-ng R&D facility in Watsonville, Calif. throughout my current journey to cowl the Indy Autonomous Problem at close by Laguna Seca Raceway.
I met with Bonsai CTO and co-founder Ugur Oezdemir, Bonsai CEO and co-founder Tyler Niday, and Brendan Dowdle, former CEO of farm-ng and now chief enterprise officer of Bonsai Robotics.
Niday supplied an in-depth demo of Bonsai’s VisionSteer software program and fleet administration interface. Oezdemir defined the main points of the imaginative and prescient steerage that doesn’t depend on spotty GPS indicators underneath the tree cover of an orchard. The person interface tracks the progress of every automobile on a mission, and the grower can return in time to see work executed on prior days.
Dowdle stated the 2 firms have been working collectively for greater than a yr on joint tasks, and that current farm-ng prospects are already piloting Bonsai’s software program with their farm-ng Amiga robots.
The Bonsai Robotics fleet administration interface permits a grower to immediately view the placement and path of the entire Bonsai Robotics enabled automobiles within the orchard. | Credit score: Bonsai Robotics
Growing a shared imaginative and prescient
The mixed firm is properly on its solution to optimizing a mutual product roadmap. The mixed groups met for the primary time earlier this week within the new unified Bay Space workplace. The corporate will mix the entire numerous groups primarily based on perform, and preserve a software program improvement middle within the Bay Space and the present {hardware} improvement labs in Watsonville (previously farm-ng), and Davis, Calif. (previously Bonsai Robotics).
The mixed autonomy system may be optimized by enabling multi-purpose machine use throughout totally different seasons, lowering gear idle time. As well as, the corporate expects to focus on particular plant wants as an alternative of blanket therapies, with the final word objective to cut back enter prices, enhance crop productiveness, and reduce environmental impression.
farm-ng just lately launched a brand new software program replace to the Amiga robotic platform. Bonsai stated the Amiga robotic will proceed to evolve as a modular, reasonably priced, and sturdy platform. The corporate was within the ultimate stage of improvement of the most recent, larger-format Amiga automobile, the Amiga Max.
The VisionSteer expertise equipment will proceed to evolve as an OEM, retrofittable answer to allow any “drive-by-wire” farm machine to turn into autonomous. Core to the corporate’s new imaginative and prescient is to design smaller, extra adaptable robots that may work in various crop environments.
Bonsai stated it can proceed creating fleet administration software program that permits one operator to handle a number of robots, whereas implementing exact imaginative and prescient techniques that may detect particular person plant situations.
‘On the on the farm-ng facet, we have been fixing the mobility half with AI robotics and laptop imaginative and prescient as first ideas,” Niday informed The Robotic Report. “The Bonsai workforce was tackling it from the software program facet, constructing a strong answer. We’ve explored plenty of totally different of those autonomy choices, and that is by far essentially the most succesful autonomy system that we consider that exists available in the market.”
He added, “That (is what) began the merger conversations between the 2 firms. We now have mobility and autonomy, mobility and navigation, {hardware} and software program to make that obtainable to the ecosystem to now construct with autonomy-first sorts of ideas.”
Left to proper: Bonsai co-founder and CTO Ugur Oezdemir, co-founder and CEO Tyler Niday, and chief enterprise officer Brendan Dowdle. | Credit score: The Robotic Report
