This Bengaluru Startup's AI Farm Robots Promise To Improve Farmers' Income By Precision Pesticide Spraying
India is still largely an agricultural country, and 18.3% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2022-23 came from the sector.?
The agricultural sector accounted for nearly 45 per cent of all jobs in the Financial year 2022 in India.
Being labour-intensive at every stage, from sowing the seeds to harvesting, has always been the nature of farming in India, and the high labour costs directly impact the income that the farmers generate from their fields.
Robots to spray pesticides?
In recent years, mechanisation has been catching up in the agriculture sector in India as well, and an agri-tech startup from Bengaluru is taking it to new heights.
Niqo Robotics is using robotics and artificial intelligence to make pesticide spraying in farms more efficient and reduce costs.
According to the company, its Niqo RoboSpray reduces chemical usage by up to 60%, saving farmers money in chemical input. The spraying also takes a fraction of the time it takes for humans to do it.
From Wall Street to farm robots?
Niqo Robotics was founded by Jaisimha Rao, an Electrical and Computer Engineer from Carnegie Mellon University in the US.
Rao, born to Kannadiga parents in Kuwait, started his career in Wall Street with investment management company BlackRock.
After seven years at BlackRock, where he rose to the rank of Vice President, Rao quit his job to return to India with a plan to do something different.
"I wanted to start something on my own. So I quit my job and moved to India. My family is from Sakleshpura near Chikmagalur, and after spending some time at our coffee plantation, I realised how much technology can make farming more efficient," Rao told?Indiatimes.
Why traditional pesticide spraying is inefficient?
One of the main problems Rao found in the traditional farming practices was how labour-heavy and costly the pesticide spraying process was.
"Almost all spraying of pesticides happens on a blanket basis, where the chemicals are sprayed across the field, be it manually or by using drones. But the pesticide should only be sprayed on the plant, and whatever was being sprayed elsewhere is a waste of time and money," Rao said.
To solve this wastage, Rao and his team worked with farmers to understand their problems. They designed a robot with multiple AI-enabled cameras that do a real-time field analysis and spray the pesticides on the plants, not the ground.?
How the robot sprayer work
"We built our custom cameras from scratch. Inside the cameras is an AI-based processor that processes the video imagery to identify where to spray the pesticides. Then the message is sent to the nozzles. From the capture of the imagery to analysis and spraying, it only takes 150 milliseconds. All these processing are done on the machine and not in the cloud," Rao explained.
Niqo RoboSpray, which can spray pesticides on around seven acres of land in an hour, can be used on a wide range of fields , including vegetables to sugarcane and cotton.
Largest fleet of precision spot spray robots
Niqo RoboSpray made its market debut in 2022. So far, the company has deployed 50 of them in three states across India -- Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka making it the largest fleet of precision spot spray robots in Asia.?
"We work with Village Level Entrepreneurs like pesticide dealers, tractor dealers, and some farmers who lease the machines from us for about Rs 5 lakh a year. They can then deploy these robot sprayers on the local farms on an hourly or daily basis. On average, they are charging around Rs 300-400 per acre from the farmers," he said.
It is not easy to convince farmers?
Rao, who said that his company aims to reach one lakh acres this year, admitted that it was not easy to convince the farmers to try their robots on their farms.
"Between 2015 and 2019, we experimented with different products, including drones and the feedback from farmers was not really encouraging, and many were not willing to take a risk and experiment with something new. Terms like robotics and artificial intelligence might sound fancy, but it doesn't mean anything to farmers. Only if you can show them the direct financial benefits of using the technology they will be open to the idea of using it," Rao said.
Niqo Robotics which currently has a team of 51 employees, including 38 involved in designing robots, is also working on other AI-enabled farm robots.
Future of agri-tech in India
According to data by NASSCOM, India had around 450 agri-tech startups in 2022, with the number growing at 25% year-on-year.?
Rao said that he was upbeat about the sector's future and that the key to moving forward is to make a visible impact on farmers' livelihoods.
"I think the future is really bright. Our job is to make sure that farmers are able to farm their land with less labour and increase yields. There is much more scope for products like smart seeders, harvesters for chillies and cotton, etc," he said.
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