Muddy Machines: The future of robotic harvesting

Muddy Machines was founded in June 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic and the urgent request from growers to find a solution to their labour supply challenges. “Muddy Machines was founded by Chris, our CEO, in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. His specialism is robotics and was sort of looking for problems that really needed solving. And through conversations with farmers and growers across the UK, found that one of the biggest problems they're facing is the labour shortage. He built up a particularly great relationship with a guy called John Chin. The Chins are a family of farmers that run Co Brew Farms, which is one of the biggest asparagus grower in the UK. And he was able to very quickly develop a prototype and test it in the fields. Since then we have been working alongside people like Co Brew Farms to test our robots in their fields, and keep harvesting asparagus.

Sprout is a lightweight all-terrain farming vehicle with the ability to carry custom implements for precision agricultural operations. “Sprout is about sort of roughly the same size as maybe a big golf buggy. It can navigate using GPS, and it can operate autonomously. We have our asparagus harvesting tool, or we call it ‘the implement’. It kind of comes down from above as it drives along to do the cutting and the picking and then the transferring into baskets. We use artificial intelligence to teach the system what an asparagus looks like. One of the most challenging parts of the design has been the part that picks and cuts the asparagus. That was difficult because asparagus is quite unusual…It's quite tough. We had to come up with a system that was sharp enough to get through the crop reliably every single time. Something that was robust enough that didn't need to be replaced.”

Sustainability is an area which Muddy Machines cares quite deeply about, especially with the environmental impact of traditional heavy agricultural machinery. “Sustainability plays a really big role in the work that we do. We design our robots to be as lightweight as possible. These days, a lot of modern agricultural equipment is just getting heavier and heavier and heavier. It breaks down a lot of the really important organic structures that plants rely on to grow, the animals rely on to live on and even that microorganisms rely on to flourish. One of the other ways we've focused on sustainability at Muddy Machines is we make our, all of our robots electric. We're 100 percent electric. We also make sure that a lot of the materials that go into our robots are safe, non-toxic and that we can disassemble them again easily at the end of their life. We try to consider the whole life of the product when we design it.”

James thinks that the future of agriculture is autonomous: “It's generally speaking true everywhere from the UK, even to places like California, that picking fruit and vegetables is very, very hard work. It's backbreaking work. There was a time about a hundred or so years ago where agriculture went from being mostly horse drawn to mostly tractor driven. We kind of think we're seeing another shift like that now. Having robots that are multifunctional and that you can have lots of doing different things at the same time, I think that's really attractive.”

Onshape is the first and only cloud-native product development platform that delivers professional-grade CAD capabilities with next-generation product data management (PDM), powering agile design processes at lower costs “Onshape enables Muddy Machines development and innovation rate in creating their robotic solutions. Unlike their previous experience with SOLIDWORKS, where crashes could result in hours of lost work, Onshape's reliable cloud infrastructure guarantees that every change is saved in real time, preventing any loss of progress and letting designers design fearlessly, knowing they can always go back to any previous state. Onshape has also streamlined part management for muddy machines, automating the generation and tracking of part numbers. This automation has eliminated the need for manual spreadsheets. allowing the team to focus more on innovation and less on administrative tasks.”.