Meet Polly, the world's first robot successfully replicating buzz pollination.
Our robotic pollination technology was successfully tested in commercial greenhouses in Israel, Australia and the United States showing results as good as and up to 20% higher yield versus manual pollination. We showed results as good as and up to 5% higher yield than bumblebees.
Equipped with cameras and AI-based computer vision, our robot recognizes flowers ready for pollination. Our air-pressure mechanism then applies calibrated air pulses to the selected flower.
Our pollination robot will work when both temperature and humidity levels are optimal in the greenhouse. Furthermore, our solution will bring about key advantages to growers currently using bees:
A non-contact solution preventing the spread of diseases by bees
The ability to work in hot and cold temperatures when bees are inefficient
Avoid the challenges faced by bees in greenhouses equipped with LED lighting
Enable the use of UV screening to decrease pest stress
Pest and Disease Detection
By monitoring all plants daily we will provide growers with early information on outbreaks and enable immediate local treatment, although later on this will be provided by the robots themselves. This will serve to reduce costs, losses and the amount of pesticides used.
What’s Next:
Our team is developing additional modules to be mounted alongside pollination. We intend to help growers solve costly and challenging efforts in pruning, pest and disease detection and yield prediction.
Non-contact pruning
Pruning is one of the most labour-intensive tasks in tomato greenhouses and in other fruit-growing enterprises (sometimes called thinning). Our non-contact, patent-pending solution should help growers substantially reduce labor costs.
Yield Prediction
In partnership with a leading Israeli agriculture research organization, we are looking to bring to the market a unique technology that will monitor fruit count and weight in the greenhouse. This solution should help growers achieve more cost-effective commercial relationships with distributors.
Monitoring
Arugga will provide growers with intelligence insights through the vast amount of data we collect in the greenhouse. This detailed data analysis should help growers make better decisions throughout the seasons and lower the uncertainty levels for better planning.
Plant Lowering
Plant lowering is a weekly labour-intensive and expensive task taking place in all tomato greenhouses around the world. Arugga has developed a patent-pending solution to help growers offset labour shortage challenges and solve this demanding task.