Making our agricultural robots as reliable as possible is essential to us. All material has a 3 year warranty. Our robots work on electric engines, which we’re all familiar with because they’re the engines that allow you to automatically close your blinds, to mention an example. Electric engines are known for their reliability and for the fact that they require only minimal maintenance. The motors on our robots and tools should be scheduled for maintenance every 5,000 hours to replace the engine’s carbon brushes. Mechanical wearing parts such as reducers should be replaced every 15,000 hours. As you can see, only very little maintenance is required. If you take good care of your robot, it’ll continue to function as new for at least 10 years on end. Please check the technical data sheet of the Oz weeding robot for more information.
any questions you'd like to ask ?
Here are the answers
Technical questions
No, no GPS, buried wires or specific markers are required to guide your agricultural robot. To find their way, our robots detect your crops and simply follow the rows. When required, they can also follow plastic mulch. In complicated situations, however, it may be useful
to place red stakes at the end of each row, but that’s it !
Our robots see crop rows as rails and detect rows with the help of two color cameras and a laser. As soon as the robot locates the crops, it can guide itself accordingly and adjust its position to optimize weeding.
When it arrives at the end of a row, the robot detects the absence of crop and turns around automatically to weed the following row. When the plot is completely weeded, the robot automatically stops and sends a text message to your smartphone to inform you the work’s done. Should you have more questions on how our robots work, please don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.
Weeding quality is essential and weeding between rows is not a problem at all. The quality of the work highly depends on the tools you use to accomplish it. If you pick the right tools, anything’s possible. To have a closer look at our choice of tools, please check the tools and accessories section in the Oz technical data sheet so that you choose the best tools for your situation in order to optimize mechanical weeding.
economic questions
That’s a vast question and Naïo Technologies really takes this subject seriously. We’re actually conducting a study at the moment to have detailed figures to back what we’re saying. Below you will find some thoughts we think are worthwhile mentioning:
Jobs don’t disappear because of robots. Robots are basically just tools: they are practical and useful but not really smart enough to replace human input.
More generally, the human workload tends to diminish thanks to tools of all sorts (internet, the phone, shovels, pens, printing machines…). There’s a long list of everyday tools that “destroy” part of the work we’d need to do without them. Two examples out of many :
- Before there was running water, water carriers had an important job to do. But who would wish for running water to disappear so that carriers could return to their harsh jobs ?
- And how could we imagine constructing modern buildings without today’s tools (excavators, cement mixers…) or even a simple house (shovel, pickaxe, saw,…). It would take up too much time for modern standards, even though a return to the past would create numerous jobs…
The more we automate work and the more sophisticated our tools become, the more important it becomes to think about how we’ll use the resulting richess. But that, of course, is an entirely different debate.
Weeding robots aren’t necessarily the right choice for everyone and they’re not adapted to all situations. As with any other investment, it’s important to consider if robots are the right way to go for your business. This being said, saving time and reducing hard work, like weeding, is generally a profitable operation. The time that was spent on weeding can now be used for other purposes : develop new crops, increase plot surface, spend more time on crop sales and management, ….
Our robots work autonomously and only use electric energy, which leads to huge savings.
The money saved on energy and maintenance is beyond comparison with regard to the combustion engines of tractors and tillers. Our experts are able to calculate the amount of savings for your business, so please don’t hesitate contact us for more details.
environmental questions
That’s an important question. Our robots are a good alternative to chemical weed control and they run on electric energy, which lowers their impact on the environment. Most of our customers are organic farmers and, just like us, they are convinced that this is the way to go. However, it would be good to have more precise data to prove what we’re saying, which is why we’re currently conducting a complete analysis of our robots’ life cycle. This will help us define the exact impact of agricultural robots on the environment in order to keep improving our work.
Should you have more questions on this subject, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
general questions
The idea was actually suggested to us by farmers. They talked about some of the challenges they face every day due to the harshness and strenuousness of the work that needs to be done, like weeding and hoeing. At the end of the day, nobody really wants to accomplish these tasks: they take up an enormous amount of time and… time is money. This lead us into thinking that automating these tasks would help reduce their strenuousness and that we could use electric tools and farming robots to solve the problem.
We’re convinced that by combining modern technology (electric engines, automated guidance, sensors…) with new agronomic approaches, we can make agriculture more eco-friendly and more humane for the farmers themselves. Our goal is to help farmers perpetuate their business by offering new farming techniques so that everyone may have access to healthy and abundant food without negative consequences for the environment.
We’re pleased to announce that numbers keep increasing and that more and more people around the world are currently using agricultural robots to accomplish farming tasks. To this day, Naïo Technologies is the only company in France to market farming robots designed for weeding and hoeing.
Since we started marketing the Oz weeding robot, we’ve obtained about 30 customers in France. This number should double by the end of 2016. Thanks to our recent international strategy, we’re now also receiving orders from other European countries.
Naïo is the name of a wild plant in Hawaii. This plant typically adapts its shape (from a small plant to a big bush) to the environment it grows in. We thought that was a pretty good name of an agricultural company… even though we were unaware of this meaning when we picked it. When we started the company, we just thought “Naïo” had a good sound to it!