Burro unveils robotic cart for autonomous crop transport
Burro is scaling up production using $10.9 million in investment from S2G Ventures and Toyota Ventures. The company's main product is an autonomous cart that can be used to move crops from the field. Burro uses a technology it calls "pop-up autonomy," which allows the cart to navigate a space without training.
The robotic device can be used to supplement field labor, which is currently in short supply. The company already has about 90 robots in the field that move table grapes and travel roughly 160-480 km per day, six days a week. The new investment will be used to increase production for existing and new customers, and the company plans to expand its fleet to 500 robots in 2022.
“Many autonomous agriculture startups first focused on autonomous tractors, autonomous weeding and harvesting, where they try to comprehensively automate incredibly complex technical tasks and often struggle to reach a large market. Instead, we started with robots that work alongside people and help move heavy items. The beauty of this approach is that today we can scale around a pain point common across the most labor-intensive areas of agriculture, while letting our platform collect data and learn about many environments, creating a foundation for scaling to countless other applications”
Agtech (agricultural technology) is one of several robotics verticals that drew increased interest during the coronavirus pandemic, as labor shortages became more visible. Burro undoubtedly caught investors' attention by quickly putting its technology into real-world testing.
Burros are collaborative robots designed to help people work more productively today, creating a foundation for greater automation where it will be more useful in the future. The carts use computer vision, high-precision GPS and artificial intelligence to follow people and move autonomously from point A to point B while carrying various useful loads.
Burros use an innovative, patent-pending approach called Pop Up Autonomy: the devices are ready to work right out of the box, each one becomes an operator, and there is no need for centralized control systems or infrastructure installation to manage all the robots.
The company's team sees a path to fully autonomous outdoor operations, starting today with robotic carts. Burros have a patented autonomy stack with artificial intelligence that has been trained over thousands of autonomous kilometers and hours of operation. The robots are designed to expand toward comprehensive automation of the most tedious outdoor work. By creating digital paths for the most labor-intensive crops, the carts build a foundation for a comprehensive understanding of every plant.
Bots can handle changing lighting and environmental/weather conditions. The autonomy stack includes machine learning models that allow the carts to move safely through weeds and branches and stop correctly when encountering real obstacles. They use a detection and tracking model to reliably follow an assigned person without remote access in any setting.
Burros have a built-in interface that anyone can learn to use in seconds. This means anyone can turn on a cart and start working right away. At the same time, all robots are online with a control panel, allowing a command-center style approach when needed.
Burro is modular and expandable, with built-in technology that forms the basis of a fully autonomous farm. The company is working to combine its vision-based, online robots with power and data to provide more capabilities both internally and together with partners.
The carts carry 12 cameras and numerous mounts for high-resolution cameras. They also feature a powerful onboard processor and graphics processing units. This combination of capabilities enables varied crop scouting behavior. The team is developing some scouting capabilities for table grapes and sharing this data with other companies interested in using the information for yield mapping, cluster counting and digital etymology.
Burros can be equipped with various attachments that provide low-dexterity functions, such as ultraviolet lighting for treating certain diseases and eliminating pests, full-area spraying or targeted spraying.
Engineers are working on higher dexterity that enables cluster removal and transport to a central point, along with pruning, selective weeding and, eventually, high-dexterity tasks that fully replicate work currently done by people. Burro is collaborating with companies looking for a mobile base capable of moving while carrying medium- and high-dexterity manipulators.
