EarthSense TerraSentia Featured in Successful Farming

EarthSense, an agtech startup based in EnterpriseWorks, was featured by Successful Farming for their innovative robot, TerraSentia. 80 of these robots have been deployed as of July 2020, and the company intends to produce 100 before the year ends.

Corteva Agriscience, a publicly traded, global pure-play agriculture company with a research and development center in the Research Park, currently uses EarthSense’s TerraSentia “to develop hardware as well as analytics to get the best possible data for our product development,” explained Neil Hausmann, Corteva Agriscience Field Sensing Lead and Distinguished Research Fellow. Although Corteva began using drones in 2015, TerraSentia is unique since it is designed to “automate in-field plant trait collection” where drones cannot reach. “Using computer vision and machine learning, the autonomous robot is currently being taught to measure early vigor, corn ear height, soybean pods, plant biomass, and to detect and identify diseases abiotic stresses.”

Hausmann said that TerraSentia is essential for Corteva because it “improves the outcomes for the grower not only to achieve higher yields, but also to help create more stable products for his operation.”

EarthSense was founded in 2016 by Chinmay Soman and Girish Chowdhary. The company develops ultracompact autonomous robots that use machine vision and machine learning to collect and convert field data into useful information. TerraSentia, their first robot, is revolutionizing agriculture. EarthSense received a Phase II SBIR award from the National Science Foundation in April 2020, was selected by the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator to join its seventh cohort in May 2020, and received accelerated funding from the National Science Foundation to transform TerraSentia into an autonomous sanitizing robot in June 2020.

To read on about how TerraSentia is automating the laborious task of collecting data to improve crop breeding, visit the Successful Farming website.