Could robots be the future of slug control?

Robots are being used to track down and destroy slugs – saving growers time and money while reducing crop damage.

It follows work funded by Innovate UK – bringing together the Crop Health and Protection (CHAP) agritech centre, the Small Robot Company and farming enterprise AV&N Lee – to explore new cost-effective and environmentally-friendly ways to control the pest.

The SlugBot monitors the exact location of slugs in the field – and then spot-sprays a small amount of bio-molluscide to destroy the pest. Project leader Jenna Ross said: “Excitingly, we’ve shown that it soon could be reality.”

More than 1600 slugs were collected during the first stage of the project – focusing the grey field slug and the Spanish slug. Image data was collected across a wide range of enivronments and scenarios.

For stage two, slug-mapping capabilities were trialled in the field using the Small Robot Company’s ‘Tom’ robot. This included testing Tom’s ability to take images, upload them or identification, and then triggering the spray application.

A final stage focused on developing the precision spraying capabilities of the robot, and trialing its use with a biological control agent. Rather than spraying a large area, the final protoype was able to spray 20x20cm square – reducing the cost.

Small Robot Company product manager Andy Hall said: “We can detect and map slugs in a field using our monitoring Tom robot and also an on-robot precision detect and spray system, which can be used to spray slugs in real time.”

The work has also proven the potential of autonomous monitoring and precision application within broadacre arable crops. The platform could be adapted to include new data sets to target a wide range of weeds, pests and diseases.