An AI driven "operating system" for robotic precision farming and other networked autonomous systems

"There is an innovation problem in farming today. Despite massive developments in precision farming, a farmer currently farms much like they did 30 years ago. Individual precision farming products, such as autonomous tractors, variable rate sprayers and crop scanning drones are being adopted, but these are expensive, and individually only bring incremental benefits. More advanced products and technologies are becoming available, but are viewed as untested or unreliable by farmers who are typically risk averse, non-technical and unwilling to make large capital investments.

All farmers need a step change in the efficiency and productivity of their land to feed a rapidly growing population, while working within tighter regulations to ever smaller profit margins.

The greatest challenge in realising the potential of precision agriculture is in creating a 'network effect' of multiple innovations working together in order to achieve significant step change. Linking together granular data collection, automated data analysis, per-centimetre soil maintenance and per-plant crop care, will provide the massive increases in production necessary, while simultaneously reducing the need for energy, chemicals and water.

The Small Robot Company is a group of experienced entrepreneurs, engineers, service designers, and farmers.

We are creating a revolutionary way to farm broadacre crops. We are building an end to end robotic crop care ecosystem, designed from the farmer's perspective. We call this Farming as a Service (FaaS).

At the heart of this ecosystem is a distributed, AI driven operating system called FaaS-OS. This software will autonomously control farming robots across multiple broadacre farms, based purely on inputs gathered and analysed with minimal human interaction.

This project is to build and trial the first iteration of FaaS-OS. The ultimate output will be software that will autonomously control a fleet of farming robots based purely on inputs gathered and collected by other robots.

This project is innovative because it is not a product, but a service designed specifically for the farmer, by farmers. It will be simple to adopt and easy to use.

Finally, this project will deliver a service infrastructure that could be applied to any other crop type using any robotic or precision farming products, and be used by countless other robotic services."