A UK start-up, founded in 2020, whose electric Sprout robot drives itself along fields to harvest asparagus.
Muddy Machines builds Sprout, a lightweight electric robot that harvests asparagus. Asparagus is usually picked by hand, one spear at a time, which makes it hard work and hard to staff. Sprout drives itself along the rows, uses 3D cameras and machine learning to pick out spears that are ready to cut, and uses a robotic arm to cut each one at the base and place it on a conveyor. According to a 2022 article, it weighs about 355 kg, which is light for farm machinery and helps avoid squashing the soil, and a battery charge of 4.5 hours gives about 16 hours of work. It can also tell spears from weeds. The harvesting tool can be swapped, and the company is working on one for courgettes (zucchini).
The company was founded in 2020 by Florian Richter and Christopher Chavasse, who started out by talking to UK asparagus growers about the problem of finding enough harvest workers. Its mission, in a quotation from the company's own team, is: "Our key mission is to make agriculture better for people and better for the planet." Mr Richter has also described the aim as supporting zero emissions and tackling labour shortages for a sustainable, resilient UK horticulture industry. The company started with asparagus because it saw it as the crop best suited to robot harvesting, and plans to move on to harder crops, and later to jobs such as weeding.
Muddy Machines is a UK company, but we could not find a published address for its base, so please check its website. What we can say is that it has worked for about a year with Cobrey Farms in Herefordshire, a large asparagus grower, to test and develop Sprout in real fields. The UK government's Farm to Fork summit at Downing Street invited its founders, and it ranked 15th in the 2024 Startups 100 index. A Royal Academy of Engineering listing from 2022 said it had four employees plus two founders; the company later told that listing it had 16, which gives a sense of how fast a start-up team can grow.
The work culture, according to the company's own account, is hands-on and iterative. In a case study, vehicle design engineer James Fraser explained that the team learns from the field and turns each lesson into a design change. Robot assembly happens in a workshop where people work from 3D designs on tablets, and each of its robots has more than 10,000 parts. The company says it is now thinking about how to build the next hundred robots rather than the next few. These are the company's own descriptions.
People in a business like this include mechanical and electronics engineers, software and machine learning engineers, people who assemble and test robots in the workshop, field operators who run them at the farms in the harvest season, and staff who work with growers. If you like building things, enjoy outdoor work, or want to use computing to solve a problem in food supply, this is a good example of how robotics can reach into farming.
Website: www.muddymachines.com
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