An Edinburgh business has won funding for its “grain-swimming robot”, which can be deployed in sheds and silos with the aim of giving farmers and storage operators accurate insights into the condition of their crops.
Crover, a robotics and agri-tech firm, has secured £50,000 from the UK’s innovation agency to progress its study of remote autonomous operations of the grain-swimming robot, harnessing artificial intelligence.
The Scotland 5G Centre (S5GC) and CeeD (the Centre for Engineering, Education and Development) supported Crover with its bid for the funding from Innovate UK.
The next stage of testing by Crover is being conducted in S5GC’s Forth Valley innovation hub.
S5GC said: “By ‘swimming’ through grain, the Crover robot provides in-situ stirring of the grain, which helps maintain its quality, as well as improving the health and safety of grain storage operations.”
It added that the new funding will support Crover in making its system “smarter” by enhancing its autonomous operating capabilities, using artificial intelligence solutions, and improving the efficiency of data transmission, including through 5G protocols, to “provide even more insight to grain handlers”.
Without the Crover robot, post-harvest losses during storage can be anywhere between 2% and 10% each year, S5GC noted.
S5GC said of Crover’s offering: “It will also help grain-storage operators reduce losses and maintain optimum storage conditions, creating a platform that can be integrated into existing monitoring systems that will improve the efficacy substantially, or substitute them completely.”
Lorenzo Conti, founder and managing director of Crover, said: “We are delighted about the support, helping us take our mission of ‘enabling humanity to reach below the surface’ further, and we look forward to the new collaboration with The Scotland 5G Centre and CeeD.
“Automation will no doubt benefit grain-storage operators hugely. However, without a mechanism to report learnings and captured by the Crover robot, all this effort is wasted. Being able to test the system in an environment like the S5GC has within its innovation hubs is invaluable and will be of huge benefit to myself and the team.”
Tom Marchbanks, business engagement manager for S5GC at Forth Valley, said: “It has been great to support Lorenzo and his team with their successful bid for Innovate UK funding. The value that 5G technologies can provide [to] organisations of any shape, size and sector knows no bounds. It is our mission to support innovative SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) that are passionate about future-proofing their operations to bring their ideas to life. A connected world relies on innovation, collaboration and open-mindedness so it’s fantastic to see Scottish businesses like Crover paving the way.”
Joe Pacitti, managing director of CeeD, said: “CeeD is really pleased to be able to help many of our members around a range of support activities and connections. Where Crover is concerned, helping the business through signposting for partners previously and in this case directing them to funding partners and seeing a successful outcome is really great news. Helping early-stage companies to find both funding mechanisms and industry partners…is an area we at CeeD are increasingly helping members to navigate their way through.”
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