Thrive is an autonomous-electric-rover robot for daily farming operations and capable of wide operations on the farm including Ploughing, Soil bed making, Weed controlling.
Freeman robots is a start-up from Kerala, focused on the design, development, and implementation of agriculture robots. Their vision is to bring technology and freedom to the hands of every farmer in the world and to attract more people into farming.
Despite the government’s all-out efforts, little headway has been made to curb carbon emissions in the agriculture sector. As per the reports, farm activities contribute 33% to global emissions.
But this can be greatly reduced, said Prince Mamman, the founder of Freeman Robots. A mechatronics engineer, Mamman has developed a robot named Thrive to automate daily farming operations. The electric-powered robot, which runs on an autonomous driving system, tackles two problems in one stroke – carbon emission and lack of labour.
“To accomplish the whole farming operations in a wide landscape, it’s difficult for a person to do the entire tasks alone, and assigning a group of workers is not profitable because of increased labor costs. The market rate doesn’t meet their expenses or generate profit over their physical effort. This seems to be the major reason for the decline in the number of farmers and a major reason for the lack of interest new generation in agriculture.
If a single person could accomplish all the tasks in a farm including Ploughing, soil bed making, seed sowing, and weed killing, then farmers could generate more profit with minimum labor cost”, said Prince Mamman, CEO and Founder of Freeman Robots.
On daily basis, in a very short time, the farmer could give the operation commands to the robot using a computer/tablet pc. Based on this, the robot will initiate and accomplish the tasks and return to the initial position. So, the farmer doesn’t need to spend the whole day on the farm, instead, he/she can go for his other works. The farmer could monitor the work and give commands to the robot from any location using GPS.
“This is also opening a new concept of “anyone can become farmers”, and so people in different professions, can do farming along with their current job. This is an opportunity for many jobless/jobseeking youngsters and even retired senior citizens and also for working professionals to earn extra income”, he added.
Thrive is able to differentiate crops from weeds via artificial intelligence. A camera mounted on the front of the robot feeds in images which are then analysed in real-time. Both inter-row and intra-row weed removal functions are achieved.
“I’m hopeful that Thrive could reduce the hardship of farmers,” Mamman said. Thrive costs Rs 1 lakh.
Thrive was an idea pitched at Maker Village, Kochi for the pre-incubation programme.