Robot Weeder
Yahoel Van Essen’s family grew up pulling up weeds from vineyards in France. If it wasn’t with hands and hoes, it was using herbicides, something Van Essen is against.
Now Van Essen is the founder and CEO of Eleos Robotics in Surrey, BC, makers of a fully-automated robotic weeder ideal for perennial crops like blueberries and grapes. After four years of development and revisions, Van Essen plans to achieve commercial production before the year’s end.
“It took just a little bit of complaining around the table to get a bit of a taste of how bad the conditions are [when weeding],” he says. “If you’re not spraying, you’re hand weeding.”
Van Essen estimates that growers spend about $800 an acre to spray weeds, and more if they are hand weeding. Options are limited for organic growers, a market he knows the new robotic weeder can assist, but he recognizes that his solution must be efficient as well as time and cost effective for conventional and organic farmers to embrace it. It checks these boxes handily.
“We want to provide a technology that can be used on an organic farm and make it economically advantageous,” he says. “We’re going through an environmental and labour crisis globally. It’s all connected. People [foreign workers] are away from their families eight months of the year pulling weeds.”
Trials on the latest Version 4.0 to modify the “arm” mechanism are underway. This multi-position arm holds and positions the microwave device that destroys the weed, killing it instantly and allowing it to decompose without spreading roots or seeds. Because the robot is low to the ground and has multiple hinge and pivot points, there is limited interaction with crops, thus avoiding fruit drop and bruising. Testing has shown it does little to no damage to grape vines or blueberry bushes in a weeding area.
A multi-spectral camera allows the robot to navigate a field and identify weeds. It patrols both day and night and one robot can protect up to 30 acres. It even returns to charge itself, so growers don’t have to go looking for it.
Mission Hill Family Estate Winery in West Kelowna is one trial participant for the robot. Fraser Berry Farms in Abbotsford is another.
“It becomes a no-brainer for the farmer,” Van Essel says. “There are a handful of startups with weeding robots. I’d say our differentiator is we have the more effective way of removing weeds and we have the smallest, we have the most intelligent and, finally, we are one of the only robots that doesn’t use chemicals. We’re building something that has never been built before.”
