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Breakthrough innovation specialist Cambridge Consultants today announced Mamut, an autonomous robot that explores crop fields, capturing data on health and yield at the level of individual plants and on a massive scale. By automating data capture, Mamut gives growers regular, precise and actionable information on their crops, enabling them to predict and optimize yields.
Agriculture is under pressure to increase efficiencies, producing greater yields with fewer inputs and less labor. To meet these demands, growers need precise information on crop growth and health throughout the growing season. Automation of data collection is essential to providing growers with information at scale. Existing large-scale monitoring approaches use drones, which cannot capture information from beneath the crop canopy. Attempts to use ground-based monitoring have been limited by the requirement for additional infrastructure, such as cabling or radio beacons.
Mamut is an AI-powered autonomous robotic platform. Equipped with an array of sensors, Mamut maps and navigates its surroundings without the need for GPS or fixed radio infrastructure. As it travels the rows of a field, orchard or vineyard, cameras capture detailed crop data at the plant level, enabling accurate predictions of yield and crop health. Mamut integrates stereo cameras, LIDAR, an inertial measurement unit (IMU), a compass, wheel odometers and an on-board AI system that fuses the multiple sensor data inputs. This sophisticated blend of technologies enables Mamut to know where it is and how to navigate through a new environment, in real time.
Niall Mottram, Head of Agritech, Cambridge Consultants, commented: “Mamut is a practical application of AI, meeting a real and pressing need, particularly for growers of specialty crops where failure carries a high cost. AI systems are already being used to understand crop conditions, yield predictions and to enable weed identification, but our autonomous robotic platform can collect valuable and granular data below the canopy, where drones cannot see. This data enables farmers to treat each plant in their vineyard, orchard or field individually, and on the scale of massive industrial farming, optimizing yields and producing more output with less input.”
Mamut’s capability to perform simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), enabling the robot to react and learn from unstructured routes in real time, was developed in navigation trials through the twists and turns of a 12-acre maize maze at Skylark Garden Centre, and at Mackleapple’s orchard, both in Cambridgeshire, UK.
Notes to editors
About Skylark
Skylark is a Garden Centre & Cafe based near March, Cambridgeshire, UK. A family run business offering high quality products in a friendly environment, also offering a top quality cafe serving fine foods from local suppliers. We thrive on giving excellent customer service. We offer a very wide range of products, including gifts, bird products, tools, animal feeds and obviously, plants.
For more information, visit: www.skylarkgardencentre.co.uk
About MackleApple
The Mackle family have been dedicated to growing and processing Bramley apples for over 50 years and remain solely concentrated on supplying the best of the crop to their loyal customers.
Our factories are staffed and managed by truly dedicated and professional people, with vast experience available in all aspects of apple production. From sales through production, delivery and admin, our people are focussed on customer satisfaction. For more information, visit: www.mackleapple.com
About Cambridge Consultants and Capgemini
About Cambridge Consultants
As the deep tech powerhouse of Capgemini, Cambridge Consultants (CC), is a global team of 800 bright, talented people. We are united by the ambition to turn brilliant ideas into technologies, products and services that have never been seen before. And which will transform business, society and the planet. Deep tech is a mindset; a bold strategy that harnesses radical science and engineering to achieve things no-one else can. It enables our clients to gain unassailable commercial advantage from defendable technology that they own. We are trusted by some of the world’s biggest brands and most ambitious start-ups to realise their critical technology-based aspirations – and we’ve been doing it for 60 years. Cambridge Consultants is part of Capgemini Invent.
About Capgemini
Capgemini is a global business and technology transformation partner, helping organisations to accelerate their dual transition to a digital and sustainable world, while creating tangible impact for enterprises and society. It is a responsible and diverse group of 340,000 team members in more than 50 countries. With its strong over 55-year heritage, Capgemini is trusted by its clients to unlock the value of technology to address the entire breadth of their business needs. It delivers end-to-end services and solutions leveraging strengths from strategy and design to engineering, all fueled by its market leading capabilities in AI, cloud and data, combined with its deep industry expertise and partner ecosystem. The Group reported 2023 global revenues of €22.5 billion
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Visit us at www.capgemini.com
