Chinese company XAG has released the R80 Agricultural Utility Vehicle, an autonomous, multifunctional farm robot.
The robot allows third-party payloads and adapts to both plain fields and sloped terrains. The XAUV R80, as the robot is called, was launched during the Smart Agriculture Conference, which was held in December in Beijing.
According to XAG, which is mostly known for its agricultural drones, the R80 can be used as a transportation platform to carry farming materials, or as a carrier for XAG’s XIoT field monitoring system, for monitoring crops, weather conditions, soil temperature, moisture and so on in the field.
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The robot can also serve as a carrier for XAG’s JetSprayer system, for spraying operations. For this, the R80 can carry up to 80L of liquid. According to XAG, it sprays up to 7 ha per hour, featuring a maximum pressure of 21 kPa and and outlet velocity of up to 130m/s. The robot has an minimum turning diameter of 0.7m and a maximum driving speed of 1.5 m/s. The spraying width is up to 12 meters.
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Next to the XAUV R80, XAG also launched an automated steering system called XAPC. According to the manufacturer, this brand-independent steering system is designed to improve operation precision and performance of medium-to-large agricultural equipment, such as wheel tractors (20 to 50 hp medium-sized tractors and large tractors with 50 or more hp) and harvesters.
XAPC is simply connected to a smartphone or a tablet, and provides access to a RTK high-accuracy navigation network which is to help avoid skips, overlaps and crop damage.
Another novelty from XAG is the Smart Agriculture System. XSAS is to provide smallholders and farm owners with meticulous production management solutions from seeding, fertilisation and crop protection to harvest.
XSAS integrates precision farming devices, agricultural IoT and AI to build scientific crop models, digitalise farming logs and achieve in-season crop growth objectives.
XAG’s new products will be launched in China first, other countries will follow in 2020.
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