Precisionwise builds robots that drive across farm fields by themselves and remove weeds plant by plant. We did not build the robots. We build the server-side system behind them. It knows the farms and fields, hands each robot its mission, and lets people follow the work live from a browser.
How the robot weeds on its own
The field is mapped. Every field is stored with its exact outline and its crop rows, so the system knows where the robot may drive and where the plants are.
A route is planned. A route along the rows is worked out for that field and given to a robot as a mission: this robot, this field, this route.
The robot drives itself. It follows the route using precise satellite positioning. Nobody has to steer it. When needed, an operator can take over and drive it by hand.
It looks at every plant. Cameras on the robot watch the row ahead. A recognition model on board tells the crop from the weeds, and the weeding tool deals with the weeds and leaves the crop alone.
It reports back as it goes. Position, battery, the quality of the satellite fix and the state of its generator come in while it drives. The farmer can watch the camera live in a browser and see whether the robot is running on its own, driven by hand, stopped or in trouble.
What we built
Farms and fields
The map
Farms, their fields and each field's outline, stored as real map shapes rather than loose coordinates.
Missions
Robot, field, route
Each job a robot does, with its route and its progress, from not ready to ready, running and completed.
Live telemetry
What the robot reports
Position, battery, satellite fix and generator, stored along the way so a run can be looked back on afterwards.
Camera streams
Watch from anywhere
The robots send their video to the server, which turns it into a stream any browser can play without a plugin.
Roles and rights
Who may change what
Farmers, operators and administrators each see only their own farms. Robots get an account of their own that can report, and little else.
A private line
Robot to server
Robots reach the server through their own encrypted tunnel. Their camera video is never open to the wider internet.
How we run it
Set up entirely from code. The whole server is described in files, so it can be rebuilt on a fresh machine and the data put back.
Tested before every release. Each new version runs through the full test suite first. If a test fails, it does not go live.
Backed up every night, and checked. An encrypted copy goes off site daily, and every night we restore the newest one to prove it works.
Watched. Uptime monitoring and alerts on the backups, plus security updates and regular checks.
It is built on open-source software and documented from the code, so another engineer can pick it up without us.
About
This is one of our engineering projects. We are Stichting Elemental (the Elemental Foundation), a Dutch nonprofit that builds software and digital infrastructure that keeps working when things go wrong.