Vineyard Robot Product

Overview

A vineyard robot is an autonomous electric machine built around the geometry of the crop: vines grow in narrow parallel rows, so the robot is a straddle — an inverted-U Gantry Frame that drives with the row passing between its legs and the canopy under its belly. One pass puts tools on both sides of the row and above it simultaneously. The format descends from the tractor enjambeur used in narrow French vineyards for a century; removing the driver and the diesel makes it viable on the labour-scarce, chemical-conscious modern estate.

Chassis and drive

The Straddle Chassis clears a 1.8 m canopy, with Track Width Adjuster leg mounts adapting the track to row spacings from 1.0 to 1.6 m. Each leg carries a Wheel Drivetrain: a sealed 3 kW Traction Motor through hub Helical Gear Pair reduction, plus a Steering Actuator giving full four-wheel steering — the machine turns into the next row at the headland in its own length. Working speed is 3 to 6 km/h depending on implement; the IMU Unit lets the controller hold a line on hillside blocks up to 20 degrees of cross-slope, where wheel slip would otherwise walk the machine downhill into the vines.

Navigation

Positioning is layered. A dual-antenna RTK GNSS Receiver receiver gives 2 cm absolute position and heading against the block map, but vines are planted by humans and rows are never perfectly where the map says. So inside the row, the two 3D Lidar units take over: the 3D point cloud resolves trunks, posts, and canopy walls directly, and the robot steers relative to the actual row, with GNSS reserved for headland turns and row-entry. An independent Geofence Module — its own GNSS and its own cutoff authority — halts everything if the machine ever leaves the mapped block, which is the regulatory backbone for running driverless machinery near roads and neighbours.

Implements

Tools mount on standardized Implement Rails with blind power and data couplings, so one robot covers the season's calendar by swapping implements.

Spraying is the highest-value task. The Spray Implement carries a 200 L Spray Tank and a per-side Nozzle Bank, but unlike a conventional airblast sprayer the eight Nozzle Valve solenoids are pulsed individually by the vision system: the RGB Cameras detect live canopy and the controller opens only the nozzles facing leaves, closing them across gaps, dead vines, and young plantings. Targeted spraying cuts chemical use 30 to 50 percent — often the line item that pays for the robot — while Airblast Fans drive droplets into the fruit zone. The Multispectral Camera meanwhile maps vigor indices per vine, turning every pass into a scouting dataset.

Trimming uses three reciprocating Cutter Bars — two vertical, one horizontal — each driven at about 20 Hz by an Eccentric Drive, hedging the canopy to the width and height set in the block recipe by the Trim Positioner actuators.

Under-vine weeding replaces herbicide strips. Each Weeder Blade hoes 30 mm below the surface in the row, and a spring Trunk Sensor feeler detects each trunk so the Swing Actuator whips the blade around it and back in under a second. Coil Spring breakaways protect the blades from buried stones, and Depth Wheels hold working depth over undulating soil.

Power and operations

Two 10 kWh LFP Battery Packs ride in forklift-loadable Pack Dock bays; a midday swap yields a 10-hour field day, and LFP chemistry tolerates the daily full cycles and the farmyard environment. Drive electronics share a liquid loop through a Radiator and Coolant Pump since sealed inverter boxes cannot rely on airflow in dust.

In service, one operator supervises three to five robots from a phone, and the machine's slow speed makes safety tractable: Safety Bumper contact strips and lidar-based obstacle stops handle the unexpected, with corner Emergency Stop buttons reachable from any side. The economics stack up from three directions at once — displaced tractor hours, saved chemicals, and the per-vine data layer that conventional equipment never produces.