The Robotics Challenge was created by Agro Innovation Lab on behalf of BayWa and RWA, two of Europe’s biggest agricultural companies, to identify the most promising up-and-coming solutions in the areas of weed control and fruit and vegetable harvesting.
Tensorfield Agriculture was selected as one of six finalists internationally, along with Agrointelli, Cerescon, Deepfield Robotics, Maskor Instituts, and Saga Robotics. The challenge was staged over multiple months and consisted of meetings and discussions with corporate mentors, as well as on-field trials of the robots. Though we were unable to bring our prototype to the trials due to the logistical challenge of it being in our workshop in China, the discussions we had with both the mentors and other participants proved to be interesting and beneficial.
Ultimately there was no winner chosen, but over the course of the program we gained a much better understanding of the European agricultural landscape as well as valuable insights on some of the challenges and solutions that the other teams had come across. Though we are currently laser-focused on delivering our solution to the US market, we look forward to collaborating with the European partners we met as part of the Robotics Challenge in the future.
At the conclusion of the challenge, a whitepaper detailing the state of the market (including Tensorfield’s solution) was released and is available for purchase here.