Sky Engine, Land Robots and NIAB East Malling Research (NIAB EMR) today announced a strategic partnership, to work together on the research, technology development and commercialisation of robotic solutions initially for vineyards and orchards.
Parties’ intention is to deliver state-of-the-art seamlessly integrated vineyard and orchards robotic management platform with entirely new capabilities to agriculture professionals, to help enhance workflow and improve farm decision-making. Land Robots, NIAB East Malling Research and SKY ENGINE AI make natural partners as their activities are very complementary, while they are all highly focused on innovative customers looking to deliver high efficiency solutions in the agronomic management space.
The collaboration in a form of a strategic consortium aims to prototyping and commercialising solutions supporting common maintenance functions in vineyard/orchard management including crops quality visualisation, disease identification, issues prediction, and ability to identify picking times for individual vines using evolutionary SKY ENGINE AI system.
The partnership includes a long-term licensing agreement that enables consortium partners to integrate the SKY ENGINE's evolutionary AI platform into several research and development projects within the scope of farming and viticulture hub to bring the edge to precise agriculture industry.
Robert Patten, CEO, Land Robots, says: “This strategic partnership agreement with SKY ENGINE AI and NIAB EMR is important for the global advancement of AI-driven robotics and computer vision in agriculture. Together we will take the technology forward to bring agile and intelligent automatisation to farming.”
Bartek Włodarczyk, CEO & President, SKY ENGINE AI, says: “We are delighted to partner in such innovative consortium with Land Robots and NIAB East Malling Research enhancing clear vision to address issues of the agriculture of tomorrow. The benefits from our automated platform will contribute to the efficiency boost in agronomic management.”