Harry, the UK’s crop planting robot

Harry is a prototype of what Small Robot claims will be the world’s first digital drilling robot for combinable crops, one of three smart robots called Tom, Dick and Harry robots that are being designed to feed, seed and weed arable crops autonomously – and whose light weight will cause less soil disturbance.

Harry is spider-shaped and 1.8 x 1.8m, which unfurls to ‘punch-plant’ seeds at a uniform depth, while recording where each seed was placed – data is fed back to the firm’s ‘Wilma’ artificial intelligence system to produce a per-plant crop map, and an early version of Wima is also on show at REAP 2018.

Funding towards the prototype came from a Horizontal Innovation Award from the IET and the High Value Manufacturing Catapult (HVMC) – to exploit manufacturing technologies used in pharmaceuticals and construction to create the drilling and planting mechanism.

Tom and Dick are already in trial and due for development next year.

Directed by Wilma, the farmbots will only feed and spray the plants that need it, which Small Robot claims will cut chemicals and emissions by up to 95%.

Inspired by the work of Professor Simon Blackmore, at the National Centre for Precision Farming at Harper Adams University, fourth-generation farmer Sam Watson Jones and entrepreneur Ben Scott-Robinson came up with the idea for Tom, Dick and Harry.

“Before we even started working on the technology, we looked at the pain points farmers were facing and realised the old model had to change,” said Jones. “Our AI-driven operating system will give farmers a more detailed knowledge of their crop and their land, allowing them to be more efficient and environmentally friendly. This will entirely change what’s possible on the farm, and how we think about farming.”

Trials are currently taking place on the National Trust’s Wimpole Estate.