48
Grower Tom Coggan and his Weed-It
but I honestly believe wherever our robots run, the country is cleaner.” Although chemical savings remain similar to those of the camera sprayers, automation has turned a seasonal bottleneck into a predictable, efficient workflow. The Coggans’ next step is to automate refilling — one of the few manual choke points re- maining. An autofill system is currently being com- missioned to automatically top up the robots’ spray tanks between runs. The aim is to reduce downtime and make spray runs virtually continuous. “It’s just about removing another stoppage point,” Tom said. “If the robots can refill themselves and keep going, it means less time waiting around and more consistent coverage across the program.”
the fleet, carrying the same camera-sensing tech- nology but running autonomously within the farm’s RTK network. “We already trusted the camera sys- tem,” Tom said. “Putting it on a robot just meant we could keep spraying even when no one wanted to sit in a cab all day.” The shift has since delivered tangible results, with each robot now spraying independently for long stretches, freeing up staff for higher-value tasks such as maintenance, logistics and crop manage- ment. The robots don’t tire, don’t rush before rain, and deliver consistent coverage. “The only thing they’ve really freed us up is labour units to drive other things or do other things,” Tom said. “I’ve got no data to back it up,
Powered by FlippingBook