Robotics milestone reached – autonomous operation achieved

Intech Engineers, under our daughter company Universal Field Robots (UFR), is pleased to announce that we have achieved another key development milestone on our autonomous field robotics programme.

The project’s goal is to bring to market an autonomous excavator product for domestic and industrial use. This has the potential to bring automation to a huge range of industrial tasks and slash costs across many industries, including agribusiness, construction, forestry and mining.

For the first time, we have achieved autonomous operation in our chosen first application, which is weed control. To do this we fitted a flail mower attachment to the prototype unit and incorporated this attachment into our software model. One of the strengths of UFR’s software approach is that the software modifications necessary were performed in less than a week and once the necessary software checks were complete we were able to proceed straight into physical testing.

Our prototype successfully passed the physical tests with flying colours, where everything performed exactly as expected with only limited alterations necessary. The unit functioned completely autonomously, free from manual input as it executed its programmed functions governed only via its software. This is another major step forward in the demonstration of this extremely promising technology.

Weed control has been carefully chosen as a demonstration application due to the high proportion of labour costs in many Australian farming activities. Our prototype unit has shown that automation of labour-intensive tasks in a field environment is possible, and the ease with which the weed control application was integrated into our prototype’s functionality gives us confidence that we will be able to apply this to a wide range of labour-intensive tasks with similar success.

Stay tuned for more information as this exciting and innovative project takes shape!

To find out more, contact us here.