For decades, the agricultural sector has been tackling the challenges around labor shortages and the need for greater productivity by introducing autonomy, initially gradually but now with increasing intensity as the technology becomes better developed and more cost-effective. However, harvesting, especially for labor-intensive specialty crops, has proven to be one of the more difficult stages to automate.

One company, Philadelphia-based Burro, has taken on that specific use-case challenge with carrying and harvest-assist cobots (collaborative robots) for crops like table grapes, blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, persimmons, and stone fruit, and for towing in nurseries. Founded in 2017, the company began with a mobility platform designed to help customers overcome the challenges of rising wages and shrinking workforces. While robotics has been successfully used indoors for years, it says it is the first collaborative robotic platform to work safely and reliably outdoors alongside human workers.

“Robots have long been stuck in warehouses and factories, and few robotics companies have successfully scaled outdoors into industries like agriculture, nurseries, and construction, where trillions of dollars are spent annually on labor,” said Charlie Andersen, CEO of Burro.

In mid-April, Futurride caught up with the company’s execs at the Agriculture & Robotics Summit organized by Innovation Works, the largest seed stage investor in the Southwestern Pennsylvania region that brought together the local robotics community and global agricultural leaders. Supported by partners Pittsburgh Robotics Network, FIRA, Walnut Capital, and the Allegheny Conference for Community Development, summit attendees discussed ways to transform the agriculture sector using robotics and automation to address key challenges like de-carbonization, resilience, decentralization, population trends, and intensifying labor shortages.

 

Force multiplication, augmenting outdoor labor

According to Burro, two significant operational challenges facing the portion of the agriculture industry it serves are an unprecedented shortage of laborers and reliance on conveyor belts that help to move plants from one site to another or to perform small-batch work. Conveyor belts are heavy, cumbersome, and can pose an injury risk to workers during set up and break down.

The company says its robots mitigate labor shortages by enabling force multiplication of workers and taking on the burden of carrying and towing heavy loads—while also boosting profitability. Burro is one of only a few autonomous robotic solutions available for this purpose. The company has hundreds of robots deployed globally in support of farms, greenhouses, and nurseries, recently achieving the milestone of having traveled 75,000 autonomous mi.

Today, the company has more than 300 harvest-assist robots in nurseries and permanent crops, where they tow trailers autonomously, patrol depot yards, and serve as a platform and physical API (application programming interface) for a growing set of technology partners. With over 75,000 autonomous miles in paid commercial use and more than 300,000 hours in operation, Burro’s reliability and scalability have been continuously enhanced, positioning the company for expansion into new markets and regions.

Burro says it offers the leading plug-and-play autonomous robot that increases productivity in conventional production environments. It features patent-pending Pop Up Autonomy that works immediately out of the box and empowers users on a job site to be up and running with very little training, and it can be used across multiple environments.

The company’s offerings do not require centralized control or installation of infrastructure. Its robots use computer vision, with or without high-precision RTK GPS, AI, and now lidar to learn and navigate autonomously. They use AI to understand their surroundings and safely travel through tall weeds and branches while stopping for real obstacles and people. The company claims they have proven to help agricultural clients realize improvements in efficiency by up to 40%.

In January, the company announced it had closed a $24 million Series B co-led by Catalyst Investors and Translink Capital and existing investors S2G Ventures, Toyota Ventures, F-Prime Capital, and Cibus Capital.

“We have built a world-class product based upon state-of-the-art autonomous AI technology, and with this funding, we will deliver solutions for real-world problems, distributed worldwide through our network of dealers,” said Andersen.

As part of the round, Brian Rich, Managing Partner with Catalyst Investors, and Kaz Kikuchi from Translink Capital, joined the company’s board.

“What sets Burro apart among the robotics sector is the team’s brilliant vision for augmenting—not replacing—labor with machines that work safely and reliably outdoors alongside humans, exponentially increasing efficiency and production,” said Rich. “The Burro approach is already proven, and its ROI demonstrated for farms and nurseries, perfectly positioning them to become the dominant outdoor robotics company for various industries and uses.”

Translink likes companies in the autonomy and robotics sector, said Kikuchi.

“We are especially excited about how Burro has brought automation to the agriculture sector,” he said. “With their unique approach, Burros can work year-round, combatting the innate seasonality of work outdoors, by operating in a variety of crops and performing multiple tasks with one platform. Burro is positioned to be the first robotic company to successfully scale in agriculture and other outdoor environments.”

While Burro has been growing in the U.S. within the berry and grape farming sectors and at nurseries, the company is looking to take an even bigger portion of the $1.2 trillion U.S. outdoor labor market, where automation can address some of the industry’s most pressing challenges.

 

Going Grande

This year, the new funding will help Burro expand its commercial, product, and engineering teams; bring on more dealers; and launch new products. In January, it introduced the all-electric Grande, its most powerful labor-saving robot, which can carry or tow heavy loads over multiple types of terrain for up to 15 mi (24 km) between charges.

The Grande expands the company’s range beyond the current “people scale” 500- and 750-lb (227- and 340-kg) payload Burro and Burro XL, both with 2500-lb (1134-kg) towing, to a true pallet-scale vehicle at 1500-lb (680-kg) payload and 5000-lb (2268-kg) towing. It features four stereo-camera units for 12 total cameras, RTK (NTRIP compatible) GPS, 3D lidar, and the Burro Operating System V5.0 software to enable lidar-based localization for autonomous movement across indoor and outdoor operations.

When paired with the company’s Atlas Mission Autonomy online platform, users can construct, manage, and share routes across their fleets. Whether towing, carrying, or following, the Grande allows equipment operators to step away from the tractor or UTV (utility task vehicle) seat, saving valuable labor.

“With labor being the number one challenge facing growers today, [they] are in dire need of autonomous solutions to help their businesses survive,” said Anderson. “Releasing this ground-breaking robot to market means that growers have a proven, viable alternative to increasingly expensive and scarce workforce options.”

The Grande is designed to support nursery and greenhouse operators as well as citrus, stone fruit, table grape, blueberry, and cane berry growers.

At the Pittsburgh summit, Burro CTO Guillermo Pita Gil shared a recent YouTube video showing the Grande testing at about three times its official rating. It towed a long line of carts at about 15,000 lb (6800 kg) for Altman Plants, one the biggest U.S. nurseries.

Traject calculations are especially crucial for towing long cart lengths, with the bigger machine’s software featuring a new mode. For most applications, the robot follows its human to learn a route, taking minutes to train. In nurseries, plants could be distributed to thousands of potential locations, so the same paradigm doesn’t work because there would be too many routes to train.

So, company engineers developed a way to map the site, adding lidar to their previous camera-focused autonomy system. A vehicle is sent out to scan and map the site and the data is sent to the cloud. The data are shared automatically with all the robots in an operation and updates on new conditions are sent to the others. For low-latency communication, Burro partnered with another event participant, Formant, for data collection and storage in conjunction with AWS.

Grande customers started getting their first deliveries last month.