Rock-clearing robotics company raises $15 million

Automation has become an increasingly important factor in agriculture and smart farming over the past decade. Recently, TerraClear, a US company specializing in rock cleaning robots , announced that it has completed a $15 million financing, which will further promote its innovation and development in the field of agricultural robots . According to Crunchbase data, TerraClear has raised $53.4 million in funding since its establishment in 2017.

The quarrying problem needs to be solved urgently

For farmers, clearing rocks from the fields has always been a headache and heavy physical labor. Rocks in the fields not only affect the growth of crops, but also easily damage agricultural machinery and equipment. The traditional manual quarrying method is time-consuming and labor-intensive, often requiring multiple people to manually clean up, and is inefficient.

In fact, the problem of quarrying has troubled farmers around the world for more than 5,000 years. Many major agricultural countries such as the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia are eager to find a more efficient and economical new method of quarrying. Faced with this stubborn problem, TerraClear has finally found a solution with its innovative technology.

Dual machines work together to efficiently clean stones

The uniqueness of TerraClear lies in the organic combination of drone aerial photography technology and intelligent quarrying robots to achieve fully automated quarrying operations.

The drone takes aerial photos of the entire farmland, uses computer vision algorithms to automatically identify and draw a distribution map of rocks in the field, and transmits the distribution map data to the quarrying robot. The robot can then navigate autonomously based on this "topographic map", quickly find the rocks and collect and clean them up.

Compared with traditional manual quarrying, intelligent quarrying robots speed up the operation process and greatly improve quarrying efficiency. It is reported that the use of the TerraClear system can shorten the quarrying operation time from two weeks to one week. While improving efficiency, the system can also save a lot of labor costs, and only one operator is needed to easily complete the entire operation.

Since rocks can damage agricultural machinery, a large amount of money is spent on repairing and maintaining agricultural machinery every year. The intelligent quarrying system can help remove rocks from the field in advance, thereby effectively reducing the risk of damage to agricultural machinery due to collision with rocks.

Recently, more and more American farmers have experienced the benefits of this system and have begun to promote its application in larger areas of farmland.

While reducing scrapped agricultural machinery and equipment and lowering labor costs, TerraClear's innovation also lies in the fact that it has opened up a new business model for local agricultural service providers.

Traditionally, quarrying operations are often completed by farmers themselves or by hiring temporary workers. TerraClear has productized quarrying services, allowing local agricultural service providers to join in and become operators and service providers of the system.

On the one hand, farmers can pay a relatively low system usage fee and enjoy the full process service of intelligent quarrying without purchasing a full set of equipment; on the other hand, agricultural service providers can use quarrying services as a new source of income to serve more farmers.

More and more agricultural cooperatives, dealers and service companies are beginning to join the ranks of its partners and become promoters and practitioners of smart quarrying services.

Although the intelligent quarrying robot is still in its infancy, the innovative ideas and development potential behind it are worthy of our attention. The introduction of advanced technologies such as drones and robots into agricultural production is an important manifestation of agricultural modernization, indicating that humans are getting rid of inefficient traditional farming methods.

With the further development and popularization of emerging technologies such as 5G and artificial intelligence, it can be foreseen that in the future, more quarrying robots, patrol robots, farmland protection drones and other robots will appear in agricultural parks.