Innovations in Food Robotics and Automation

The goal of robotics is to improve human life. One consistent pressure point in the human experience is effective, ethical agriculture at scale. An important step towards having robots that can effectively help in farming is 1) having robots that can handle the most delicate produce with minimal damage and 2) being able to quantify any damage that is incurred during manipulation. Our recent work, "DexFruit: Dexterous Manipulation and Gaussian Splatting Inspection of Fruit," by Aiden Swann, Alex Qiu, Matthew S., Angelina Zhang, Samuel Morestein, Evan Kai Rayle, Monroe Kennedy III, takes a first step in beginning to develop a robotic solution to delicate fruit manipulation. While this work is not the first of its kind, it brings the latest advances in tactile manipulation through the DenseTact sensor and the power of Gaussian Splatting for rendering and evaluating the damage on produce (namely strawberries to start). While the road towards robots that can effectively plant and harvest may be long, it will be filled with meaningful steps like this by the robotics community that help us meet this critical societal need. - Paper website: https://lnkd.in/gDayQih4 - Arxiv: https://lnkd.in/gB9VZf8F - Video: https://lnkd.in/gKkYP22c

Today’s thought: Innovation never stops—it evolves! I love seeing stories from companies I chose to highlight in my book The Experience Mindset continue to unfold. I highlighted Chipotle for its forward-thinking approach to using technology to improve both employee and customer experiences. At the time, Chipotle launched the "Cultivate Next" fund and opened an innovation center where it developed a robot named Chippy to help make their tortilla chips more efficiently to keep up with demand. When launched this showcased how automation can be used to reduce repetitive tasks and free up employees to focus on more meaningful work. Well, they are at it again. This time, they’ve unveiled “Autocado,” a robot designed to halve, core, and prep avocados for guacamole. With Autocado, Chipotle is pushing the boundaries of innovation even further, cutting down the time it takes to prepare guacamole from 50 minutes to just seconds. By reducing the manual effort required to prepare avocados, Chipotle empowers its employees while simultaneously speeding up the preparation process for customers and improving CX. It’s a perfect example of how constant improvement and innovation can push the envelope on what is possible. As discussed in the book, enhancing both EX and CX simultaneously is the key to sustained growth, and Chipotle continues to invest to find ways to do that even more. How is your company using technology to support both your employees and customers in new and innovative ways? #customerexperience #employeeexperience #CX #Growthmindset #innovation Chipotle Mexican Grill #technologyforgood

AgTech Ecosystem - slide 4 of the "labor-automation-Peru-innovator" deck. I will link to the main post for the whole deck in the first comment. This slide summarizes what's going on with specialty crop automation. Recall the ag labor number is high ($16.3B/yr for 850M hours in CA) and the forecast is that CA will lose 32% of acres (9M) and 51% of farmers (45k) from 1997-2052. Much of the acreage loss is because of the challenges CA farmers face related to labor. The most likely solution to labor challenges is automation. 1) Current sales forecast (which Ben Palone and I try and track) is for $150-200M in automation sales for 2024 from multiple contributors and for three years (2024-2026) the current forecast is $700-800M. That number is likely to increase over the next year. 2) Where is automation having success? Weeding robots continue to deliver good performance at economics that work for growers, particularly Carbon Robotics (laser weeder) and Stout Industrial Technology, Inc. (mechanical weeder), with FarmWise in the one to watch category as they shift from service to capital equipment sales. Spray robots are also delivering quality results for growers, particularly GUSS Automation and Ecorobotix (one to watch as they shift from service to capital equipment sales). All solutions mentioned above range from $240,000 to $1.4M each. In the small robot category, Burro and Farm-ng lead in volume with robots that range from $10-25k depending on size and accessories (Burro offers 3 sizes of Burro and a mower robot). 3) Where are we struggling? Harvest, which represents 60-75% of hours for specialty crops, especially crops like strawberries which have high hour counts required and up to 90% of hours are spent on a long harvest season. 4) There are some recent activity highlights worth mentioning. John Deere has purchased Smart Apply®, Inc. and Bear Flag Robotics in the past few years and has done a joint venture with GUSS Automation. CNH has acquired Raven Industries and a stake in Stout Industrial Technology, Inc. Kubota Corporation acquired Bloomfield All of these transactions are good for the space. Automation is difficult to achieve an IPO from a revenue or revenue growth perspective, so M&A is the most likely exit outcome for startups. Anything that increases strategic investment or M&A activity tends to increase conversations around both of those activity sets from both sides of the table. 5) Carbon Robotics' recent investors included NVIDIA as a strategic investment with a board seat (each weeder uses 24 GPUs) and an ex-Sequoia partner from BOND took a board seat. With their recent $70M raise, the total raised for Carbon Robotics is over $150M. Having any key player successfully fund raise helps validate the space. Next up - VC challenges. Rhishi P. Sachi Desai Rob Trice Tim Nuss Norm Groot Jynel Gularte Rob Dongoski Carter Williams Danny Bernstein Damian Mason Todd Thurman