Agricultural technology company Solinftec is expanding its Solix Ag Robotics offerings to include a spray robot designed to detect and spray weeds. This cutting-edge technology is slated to become commercially available in 2023 to farmers, cooperatives, and ag retailers.
Solinftec, which already has a Scouting robot on the market since spring 2022, said it has designed its robots to help producers reduce their chemical inputs and deliver a lower carbon footprint and environmental impact.
The new Solix Sprayer robot will provide autonomous and sustainable spot-spray applications on grower’s fields. Similar to the Solix Scouting robot, the spray robot is powered by four solar panels that control the drive system and the spray system while providing reports on crop populations, weed identification and densities, disease identification and thresholds, insect identification and thresholds, nutrient deficiency identification and densities, NDVI among other layers of maps for data analysis, and much more useful data to the grower virtually 24/7.
The Solix spray robot will provide weed spot-spray maps with analysis on inputs saved and can services up to 96 acres per day depending on the field shape and terrain.
Solinftec has partnered with McKinney Corporation to produce and manufacture the Solix Srpayer.
A Brazil-founded company with its U.S. offices in Indiana, Solinftec is aiming to revolutionize how farmers run their business with end-to-end mission critical solutions, generating up to 70 percent efficiency improvements by turning data into action. With more than 15 years of experience developing digital ag solutions throughout various geographies and crops around the world, the Solix Ag Robotics, connected and integrated with Solinftec’s ALICE AI platform, works together to orchestrate machine operations and calculates producers’ ultimate needs and objectives and delivers real-time actionable recommendations and actions in a more eco-friendly way.
“Weed detection is a leading issue in fields across the North America and the Solix Sprayer is designed to not only monitor and scan fields like the original scouting version, but detect and manage weeds with technology which allows the device to spot-spray into the plant instead of from above, eliminating drift and social compaction caused by larger machines and help lower environmental impact,” said Leonardo Carvalho, Solinftec’s director of operations.
Pilots for the Solix models are currently running in North America in partnership with the ag cooperative GROWMARK, Purdue University in the U.S., and Stone Farms and the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
