An agronomist consulting to asparagus growers wanted the harvest carried out of the field, and the numbers that run a harvest — who picked, from which property, what it weighed — captured out there as it happened. Cloud Farming's answer was a pair: FieldBot, a solar- and battery-powered harvest platform, and FieldApp, on a ruggedised Android tablet wired to a custom weight scale. Tekt Industries built the electronics in house and delivered five trial machines.
Cloud Farming is an Australian agtech company. Its founders — an agronomist consulting to asparagus growers, a mechanical designer out of agricultural equipment, and software engineers — were building an autonomous field harvesting aid alongside their existing commitments, with no robotics or autonomous vehicle experience between them. Tekt Industries did the systems engineering and the system design, and integrated it with the mechanical design coming from the client's agricultural machinery engineer.
FieldBot runs four four-kilowatt brushless DC motors, direct drive, with no gearbox or torque conversion — each on its own dedicated driver, centrally controlled by a Raspberry Pi Compute Module, with GPS and Wi-Fi on board. Wheel span and undercarriage clearance were set to straddle rows and clear the foliage being harvested, with strawberries and other row crops the intended extension beyond asparagus.
Removing the gearbox made braking the hard problem: on a machine this heavy, dynamic electric braking has to be blended against the mechanical brakes. We used field-oriented control on the drivers and worked through repeated trials to tune stall torque and traction against the mechanical braking system.
Four twenty-four-volt lithium iron phosphate packs supplied the vehicle, sized for a full day of professional operation with solar regeneration, and large and heavy enough to be a defining constraint on the design. We developed the charging systems, built the distance and collision sensing custom, and retrofitted and upgraded the vehicle's electronics on site.
FieldApp and the cloud services behind it are the other half of the pair. It runs on a ruggedised Android tablet connected to a custom weight-scale system, which puts the scale and the record of who weighed what on one device. Data captured against each worker and each property across a farmer's operation is what the labour management, yield tracking, safety, quality assurance and product traceability all rest on.
Tekt built all the electronics in house, though not the mechanical system. Five trial machines were built and one went to field trials, where it navigated flat ground and rough terrain under full remote control. The programme did not progress beyond that.
Cloud Farming FieldBot demonstration
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