In the rainy season, the east wind is warm, the new seedlings are rained, the jointing and booting of wheat, and the spring plowing and spring tube enter a critical period.
When you walk into Tonghe Street in Pingdu City this season, you will see a "colossus" 4.5 meters long and more than 2 meters high driving back and forth in the green wheat fields. This is the unmanned high ground crevice boom machine developed by Qingdao Wu Niu Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. is spraying pesticides on the wheat field.
This "big guy" can be loaded with 700 liters of pesticides at a time. It does not need to be driven by humans. It "rides" on the wheat seedlings through four high wheels and drives in the wheat fields at speeds ranging from 1 to 8 kilometers per hour. The pesticide spraying of nearly 800 acres of wheat can be completed in one day, and the efficiency of manual operations is hard to beat.
Including the unmanned high ground clearance boom, the unmanned orchard management machine and agricultural picking robots developed by Wu Niu Intelligence have been "off the ground" in turn, and the first in the country to realize the commercial application of unmanned intelligent agricultural machinery , Is further promoting agriculture from "relying on the sky to feed" to "relying on technology to feed."
9 years of deep cultivation and entered the "first echelon" in the field of unmanned agricultural machinery
In the agricultural field, machine substitution is an urgent need. Fang Ke, director of operations of Wuniu Intelligence, told reporters that the original intention of Wuniu Intelligence to use artificial intelligence for agricultural machinery is to solve problems such as the aging of the agricultural population and the continuous increase in labor costs.
Looking at the world, the compound annual growth rate of artificial intelligence applications in agriculture has been 22.68% in the past five years, and the most active application is agricultural robots. According to Tractica, a well-known research and consulting organization, the global agricultural robot market will approach US$90 billion in 2025.
In the general trend of smart agriculture, the total power of China's agricultural machinery is about 25 million units, most of which are "basic models" such as tractors. Overcapacity of low-end agricultural machinery products and insufficient original innovation of high-end products are problems that need to be solved urgently in the "upgrade" of my country's agriculture.
Smart agricultural machinery has high complexity, large investment, and long cycle. At the beginning of its establishment, Wu Niu Intelligent has set up teams in China and Australia. The technical leader of the domestic team is an engineer with many years of experience in the research and development of unmanned driving technology, and the chief scientist of the Australian team is a PhD in robotics graduated from McGill University. On the basis of a strong R&D team, Wu Niu Intelligent has also borrowed "external forces" to cooperate with China Agricultural University, Shandong Agricultural University, South China Agricultural University, Northwest A&F University, Shandong University of Technology, Hainan University, and Citrus Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Agriculture , Qingdao Agricultural University, etc. have cooperated to add "think tank" support to smart agricultural machinery.
To truly realize smart agriculture, we must first solve driverless technology. According to Fang Ke, relying on a strong R&D team for 9 years in the industry, Wu Niu Intelligent has achieved key technological breakthroughs in the field of unmanned driving. It can comprehensively apply Beidou global positioning system and 5G technology, integrate high-definition cameras, radar and other sensors, and develop independently The unmanned navigation control algorithm enables the equipment to realize functions such as intelligent route planning, autonomous operation, and intelligent return to the field in a complex agricultural production environment.
based on this, Wu Niu Intelligent has taken the lead in realizing the large-scale commercial application of unmanned intelligent agricultural machinery in the country, and has entered the global "first echelon" in the field of artificial intelligence agricultural machinery research and development.
Can spray medicine, weed, and pick accurately
The high ground gap sprayer used for spraying pesticides is one of the “masterpieces” of Wu Niu Intelligent. Not only wheat, but also rice, corn, cotton and other similar field crops can enjoy the same "service".
For the field of fruit planting, Wu Niu Intelligent has launched an orchard management machine. It is smaller in size and is suitable for flexibly shuttled in large-scale orchards to realize the whole process of unmanned operations such as pesticide spraying, mowing, transportation, picking and real-time data collection. At present, this equipment has been delivered and applied in Shanghai's first "Hema Village", Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences and other places.
When the fruit ripens season, the picking robot has a "useful place". The robot is equipped with a machine vision system based on neural network learning. It has been trained in picking in China and Australia for many years. According to the different seasons in the northern and southern hemispheres, it picks two seasons a year and has accumulated a large amount of data, which has formed a very high technical barrier.
Under natural outdoor conditions, the picking robot can identify all Red Fuji apples within a square meter area within 0.2 seconds, with an accuracy of over 93% and a recovery rate of 80%, each "picking hand" within 7 to 8 seconds A series of actions from picking to collecting can be completed. This efficiency is already the first in the country and the top three in the world. More intimately, the "picking hand" is made of flexible materials, which can effectively protect the surface of the fruit; and a machine can be equipped with multiple robotic arms in a parallel structure, which greatly improves the efficiency of apple picking.
Fang Ke introduced that at present, the robot has entered the citrus orchards in Yantai Apple Orchard, Chengdu and Yunnan. "Including seedling, fertilization, labor, etc., the current production cost per catty of apples in Shandong is about 1.2 yuan; and robots can replace labor in the steps of spraying pesticides and picking, and the overall production cost can be reduced to 80 cents per catty. "Fang Ke said.
Machine substitution is not only efficient, but also more effective. Fang Ke gives an example. In practical applications, robots are often "sent" to spray pesticides at night, because the night is a high-frequency period of pests, and the effect of pesticides is much higher than that of the day.
Agriculture has a "smart brain" and "online farming" becomes a reality
Unmanned agricultural machinery is only part of smart agriculture. As early as 2015, Wu Niu Intelligence proposed a trinity smart agriculture solution of "smart agriculture control cloud platform + driverless vehicle + work robot", and in 2018 established an unmanned farm of nearly 1,000 acres in Pingdu .
In this special farm, Wu Niu Intelligent has built a cloud platform for smart agriculture management and control, and obtained basic information such as agricultural data of the field and the growth status of crops by installing Internet of Things equipment, and formed it into a cloud map and installed it on the machine. The "brain" is realized, and "online farming" is realized. Therefore, even in the busy season of farming, there are few farmers working on the empty farms. The smart agricultural machines in operation are particularly eye-catching. More than 70% of the tasks such as weeding, spraying medicine, and fruit picking are all unmanned.
Fang Ke introduced that through the control platform, technicians can "do farm work" without going to the ground, and the satellite bird's-eye-view map can observe the operation of unmanned agricultural machinery in real time. "After planning the driving route, click the start button, and the driverless car will follow the planned route. The whole process can visually identify where the tree is, where the apple is, and complete operations such as precise spraying, precise picking, and weeding. The video in the upper left corner of the screen Real-time changing scenes will be displayed. In addition, various agricultural machinery status information such as throttle control, water volume, distance starting position, radar, etc. will be displayed in real time on the big screen." According to him, through "cloud farming", all the farm's operating data All can be stored in real time, which also provides support for the traceability of agricultural products.
With the development of technology, Wu Niu intelligent unmanned agricultural machinery has gradually covered the entire process of farming, planting, management, and harvesting, truly "liberating" people from the heavy agricultural work. Fang Ke introduced that Wuniu Intelligence has undertaken the construction of unmanned farms from many units such as Alibaba, the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and Chongqing Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The "cloud farming" service supported by artificial intelligence will be implemented in more regions. .
