Solinftec, an agricultural technology company founded in Brazil and headquartered in West Lafayette, Indiana, says it has grown its fleet of autonomous, solar-powered Solix field robots more than 15-fold in three years, to more than 100 machines working in 13 US states and Puerto Rico, Global Agriculture reports.

The robots use the company's in-house artificial intelligence platform, ALICE, to process images as they travel the rows, identifying individual plants, weeds, pests and disease symptoms and spraying only where a target is found. Solinftec says growers using the system have cut chemical inputs by an average of 83% to 89% compared with blanket spraying, and that the robots now monitor more than 95 million plants on about 55,427 acres.

Travel speed has doubled to about 2 miles per hour. A robot costs roughly $55,000, which the company estimates growers can recover in about two and a half years through chemical savings alone.

Its Autonomous Refill Station, which lets a robot drive back and refill its tank with water and product without an operator, finished its first full commercial season with more than 1,700 refills and over 45,000 gallons transferred. Solinftec is developing four variants, from the solar-electric X1 to a diesel XR, with tanks from 50 to 1,200 gallons.

The company has opened an Amazon storefront for spare parts to cut downtime and is aiming for about 200 robots and 80 more refill stations by 2027. The performance figures are Solinftec's own.

Photo: Solinftec / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Source: Global Agriculture