First, a bit of history. How did you get here?

I studied mechanical engineering and mechatronics at university and went on to do a PhD at the University of Surrey, looking at control systems for bionic limbs. It was all about how microprocessors and intelligence could be applied to help people walk more effectively.

I ended up at a medical device company for 15 years working on assistive devices and exoskeletons, and led the development of several products from concept into commercialisation. Ultimately, I was Director of Research and Technology at Blatchford - then I got a phone call out of the blue, asking if I was interested in farming robots, and it sounded really cool. When I found out what SRC was doing, I thought it was a brilliant application of technology and found it very attractive.

David was previously Director of Research and Technology at Blatchford before joining SRC.

Applying new sensing technology and data driven capabilities to a new field always has a massive disruptive effect. At heart, I’m a frustrated scientist, so the idea of applying something new on a scale that has never been achieved before was really exciting.

We’re looking at really cutting-edge mechatronics, autonomous vehicles, sensing and action capabilities, and processing large volumes of data in the cloud. It’s all very exciting and a bit of a dream mix of technologies for a fantastic mission.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you do at SRC?

I’m helping to take the technology forwards bringing it closer to commercial production. It’s not easy to meet regulatory and safety requirements; doing a research and development project is one thing but reaching production quality is quite significant – as is being able to make100s of robots, not just one or two.

So we simplified the design to offer as much future potential as possible as well as processes for manufacturing, to reduce costs of production. It all comes down to modularity, which provides both flexibility and scalability. We can now reconfigure the robots easily into different sizes, and as they’re now modular we can use 90% of one robot to do a different job, whether that’s crop scanning or spraying.

So what does that mean for the future?

Previous robot designs were focused around a single task, Tom v3 is a great scouting robot but has no payload capacity. By making the robot construction modular, we can create a different platform very quickly that opens up lots of future possibilities as well as enable us to accelerate commercialisation.

Tom, Dick and Harry now have the same drive units, power units, navigation modules - the same basic platform. They are 80-90% the same.

It gives us makes a solid foundation for the future – the robots can be larger, longer, and have different functions. We don’t have to start from scratch for anything new – we can now easily adapt the robots for different requirements, which was a bit of a mindset shift to start with.

How close are you to making this a commercial reality?

We’re quite well advanced now: We’ve done pre-compliance testing and will soon be UKCA compliant.

We are currently building more pre-production prototypes to refine and prove the manufacturing and assembly processes. The robots will be commercially ready in September this year – they will be on farms, doing what they do.

**“I can envisage multiple robots at a time or even robots connected in long trains covering much more of the field in one pass”.**

So how do you see this developing now?

The reason we changed how we design and manufacture the robots is for scalability, being able to cover more ground and do more things, so we needed pathways to make this happen. I can envisage multiple robots at a time or even robots connected in long trains covering much more of the field in one pass. There will be increasing levels of autonomy, with them all being managed remotely like air traffic control.

What has been the highlight of working at SRC?

It's been just over a year, but the but the highlight has been seeing the way the team has been able to produce that next generation robot platform along with the data processing pipeline, visualisations and analytics we are now able to achieve and show farmers via Wilma, its given us all lots of confidence. Being able to realise it in the timeframe we have has been amazing. It puts us in a good position for the future. Realising solid foundations to build on is very satisfying especially when you know what your doing is a sector undergoing transformation.

A view from the team: David Moser