About

Our vision is to create a digital-twin for the farmers, through robot-swarms, powerful algorithms and a powerful web platform in order to increase productivity, efficacy and our food quality, aiming for a greener agriculture future through integrated crop management practices and herbicides usage minimization. We are bringing nature back to agriculture, by shaping a greener future using Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. We envision farmers as strategic planners, able to make strategic farming decisions provided by our AI algorithms, based on a vast amount of collected and processed field data. “Every year weeds destroy enough food to feed 1 billion people. Not only this but we must produce more food over the next 50 years than we did over the last 500 years. We believe we can solve the weed control problem, for both conventional and organic farmers, leveraging Robotics and Artificial Intelligence.” We provide a state-of-the-art solution for organic weeding through our fully electric and autonomous agricultural robot platform. In modern agriculture, the rapidly growing field of agricultural robots deeply participates in the integrated crop management and this is highly aligned with our goal to contribute to the weed control problem through precision agriculture and herbicides usage minimization.

Solution & Product

Our product is a fully electric and autonomous robotic platform, able to navigate autonomously in row crop fields and execute mechanical or laser weeding using state-of-the-art Robotic and Artificial Intelligence technologies. We automatize weed management while maintaining a highly organic and time-effective method that helps farmers to efficiently and effectively control weeds at any time with absolute respect to the environment. The mechanical weeding task is executed by the Passive Row Cultivator covering areas between the plant rows (inter-row), as the robot navigates autonomously within the crop rows. The laser weeding is been executed with very high precision through very accurate weed detections and treats the weeds with a high-energy laser beam. The weeding task can be executed in different crops such as potato, cotton, aromatic and medicinal plants, and baby leaf crops as the robot can navigate into fields with different geometries due to its adjustable width chassis.

Innovation & Scalability

Our robot is a multi-functional tool in modern farming and especially in green and organic farming. We call it multi-functional because except for the weed management our autonomous robot could perform other tasks including crop measurements, data collection and analysis, and carrying existing farming equipment as it can also act as a farmers’ “digital twin”. The problems that we deal with are the Autonomous Navigation, the Safety and Consistent operation of the robot, the development of a user friendly interface to interact and communicate with the robot as also the implementation of robust and extendable AI algorithms for perception, detection and decision making. We also face big challenges regarding the mechanical and electronic parts of our robot as it operates in harsh environments under tough conditions and we are willing to provide a robust and safe certified robot to our customers.

Traction & achievements

We are happy to see that our idea is fully aligned with the EU's green deal vision. Since our company registration we have participated in several AgriTech Business competitions and we are excited to see our idea as a finalist in almost all of them.

Specifically,
- 6th Annual John & Mary Pappajohn Business Plan Award: Top-5 Overall - Granted financial award
- Trophy-Τροφή Challenge: Top-10 finalist in AgriTech Startups
- 11th NBG Business Seeds: Selected for NBG Business Seeds Accelerator program
- Farm2Fork Hackathon 2020: Top 20 finalist - Granted Pitch mentoring
- Venture Impact Award 2020: Qualified in the 2nd phase.
- agROBOfood 2nd OpenCall 2021: Qualified in the 2nd phase.
- 1st Level-Up Accelerator Bayer Hellas 2022: Selected for Level-Up Accelerator Bayer program
- EIT-Food Seedbed incubator 2022: Selected for EIT-Food Seedbed incubator program

In parallel with the above efforts we have created two robot prototypes - a proof of concept one and the second which is a real scale autonomous robot able to navigate in real field conditions. Currently we are finalizing the design and development of our MVP and we are about to have our first pilotic trials at the end of 2023.

Team & Why Us

Our competitive advantage is that we provide an easy-to-use, flexible, modular and an all weather heavy duty weeding solution supported and developed by our highly specialized team. Our team consists of experts in Automotive, Embedded Systems, Mechatronics, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence as well as Agronomy and Economics. Our core members have great technical and managerial experience in large-scale projects by working for several years with top-tier companies in the Automotive and Software sectors like Porsche AG, AUDI AG, Continental AG, Taboola, ZOOX, etc. Finally, one of the most important factors of Terra Robotics' great potential is that its key members are active in the agriculture business and especially in Medicinal & Aromatic crops for many years, so we not only have direct access to test fields but we have identified the problems from our team members’ own experience.

Funding Needs

For the future of our project, we strongly believe that we have to use a national or EU funding program as such a choice will provide us with great supporting benefits regarding the funding and specifically the salary expenses and the supply of various needed equipment. Apart from this, we want to accelerate our project by finding a private funding scheme that could help us in the first high-demanding years to stabilize our presence and provide great returns afterward. Last but not least, we are constantly looking for collaborations with other companies, organizations, institutes, etc., as we believe that this will help us to develop faster our innovative product.