Aigen’s Solar-Powered Robot Eliminates Herbicide-Resistant Weeds

After Kenny Lee had a successful exit from a company he co-founded, the serial entrepreneur was looking for his next big challenge. He had two criteria about where he should focus his efforts.

The first was that the new problem would need to be difficult on a micro level. It had to push Lee to grow as a person. The second was that he needed to tackle something challenging on a macro level. Whatever he did next had to be impactful on a global scale.

“When you look at the challenges across the world, agricultural is the pillar of society,” Lee says. “We eat three times per day, and yet, if you look at the investment dollars in terms of startup opportunities, it’s one of the least funded industries. That caught my attention.”

From there, Lee started investigating. His deep dive into the horizontal and vertical chain of agriculture led him to a small organic hobby farm and corresponding school. For an entire growing season, Lee worked on everything: planning, seeding, weeding, and harvesting. He also met the man who would become his Aigen co-founder, Richard Wurden.

The two connected over farming and began thinking about how their complementary skillsets could be combined to develop the next great agtech solution. With Kenny’s background in cybersecurity and software, and Richard’s knowledge of innovative hardware, the world’s first AI-driven, network-connected robotic service, powered entirely by the elements was born. Aigen’s robot, aptly named Element, immediately began to tackle one of agriculture’s trickiest problems: chemical usage.

“When we started asking farmers about the biggest challenges they face, there were two main areas they talked about: the initial planting at the beginning of the season, and the harvesting at the end,” Lee says. “However, something that often gets overlooked is the overuse of chemicals throughout the growing season. We assume that chemicals will work because they have always worked, but that’s not the case.”

“There’s herbicide resistance that’s increasingly becoming a problem,” Lee continues. “Precision sprays are not going to work with herbicide resistance. The only way we found to eliminate this problem is to use the ancient technology of a hoe for cultivation, so we put that on our robots.”

The Element may use one of the industry’s oldest known tools, but it does a lot more than streamline the task of weeding by hand. True to its name, the robot uses solar and wind energy to power the robots, decreasing a farm’s reliance on fossil fuels. The clean form of energy also makes it possible for users to leave the machines out in the field throughout the season without consistently losing time to recharging, refueling, or babysitting the machines.

Sold as a service, Aigen’s fleet of autonomous Element robots are deployed in the fields for an entire growing season, eliminating weeds without harmful chemicals and leaving farmers to focus on other tasks. The robots run every day and sleep on the farm, waking up when they are deployed in the fields. Lee compares the technology to a Roomba vacuum that’s always docked somewhere in the house, ready to go right on schedule.

Element’s weeding prowess aside, Lee says the biggest benefit of deploying the robots is their intelligence-gathering capabilities. As the self-powered and self-sustaining system roams around the farm each day for an entire season, each robot is scanning the fields and collecting data about pests, diseases, and other potential issues. This information is shared across the network of machines and can then be translated using the power of artificial intelligence. The result is a solution that can send alerts to help farmers make faster real-time decisions about problems they need to act on right away.

Another difference between Element robots and others on the market is that the technology is designed to think beyond the traditional weeding method that measures success in terms of passes through the field. Instead, Aigen’s fleet focuses on “acres under management.” Each robot is responsible for maintaining a clean field for a certain number of acres—anywhere between 20 and 40 acres, depending on the density of the weeds. When focusing solely on data collection, the robots go much faster.

Today, Aigen has 50 robots in operation, all of which work on sugar beets crops in the Red River Valley region of North Dakota. But sugar beets won’t be the only crop to benefit from Aigen’s solution for much longer. The company is current testing its machine on organic edible soybeans and cotton, two crops that are similar in shape and volume, and are commonly grown in the same region. Aigen is excited to connect with producers of these two crops, particularly cotton, which is notorious for being one of agriculture’s dirtiest crops in terms of water and chemical usage.

“We feel passionately about helping farmers to grow sustainably,” Lee says about the shift to include cotton. “It’s one of those crops that we have on our bodies every day. From an impact perspective, we know our robots can make a big difference.”

To learn more about Aigen and what a fleet of Element robots can do for your farm, visit aigen.io.