Small Robot Co., UK, announced its first commercial service for weed mapping and previewed the next generation of its Tom monitoring robots.
Tom will autonomously cover 20 hectares per day, and can distinguish plant details at sub-millimeter resolution, with less than one millimeter per pixel resolution on the ground. The next generation Tom design incorporates factors such as weather-proofing, speed, camera capacity and extended battery life. Designed from the ground up, it carries double cameras, exponentially increasing monitoring capacity to 4 meters squared and covering 20 hectares per day. The new Tom weighs only a few hundred kilograms, and will be truly autonomous. For the initial service, it will be handled by a single robot operator, and will fit in a small van, so it can be easily taken from one farm to another.