Luke Skywalker purchased R2-D2 and C-3PO to help tend his uncle’s farm — but that was the stuff of science fiction, right? A robot working a farm is something you’d see only in a movie like “Star Wars.”

Well, fiction has come to life on the farms of Earth. Meet Sprout, an autonomous, electric-powered, four-wheeled robot that won’t leave the farm to help fight Darth Vader but will instead work as many as 16 hours picking asparagus and, soon, other crops. It will find its way to the fields and return home without assistance. It just needs to be fully charged after a day’s work. 

Sprout is the star product of Muddy Machines, a U.K. firm that believes its precision-picking robot can help farmers overcome labor shortages and grow crops more sustainably. It could also save them from muscle pain.

“Our key mission is to make agriculture better for people and better for the planet,” said Muddy Machines Vehicle Design Engineer James Fraser.

Heard of Sprout robots on the field. A “herd” of  Sprout robots deployed on the field. (Courtesy: Muddy Machines) 

Robot Called Sprout Rolls Out

Founder and CEO Chris Chavasse started Muddy Machines in 2020 after talking with U.K. asparagus farmers about the significant manual labor shortage that’s preventing them from maximizing their crop harvests. They secured government grants and got to work designing a smart, mobile machine that could take the place of human farmhands. A year later, Sprout muddied its wheels on a farm for the first time. The successful test eventually led to several Sprout models now working on two farms, including Britain’s largest asparagus producer.

Sprout is the sum of three distinct parts: the vehicle framework, a harvesting tool, and its computer apparatus. 

Sprout’s total mass is about 755 pounds (355 kilograms), but it was designed to leave the lightest possible impact on soil. The vehicle’s lithium batteries need 4.5 hours of charging to produce 16 hours of run time. Sensors and 3D cameras allow it to autonomously travel a farm’s grounds, surmounting small obstacles and stopping to alert a farmer of large ones. A machine-learning process studies the images captured by Sprout’s cameras to determine where each asparagus plant’s base is and when a plant is ripe.

When it’s time to harvest, a robotic tool based at the bottom of Sprout removes the plants. 

“Asparagus grows close to the ground,” said Fraser. “When it’s picked by hand, you have to bend down to the ground and cut it right at the base.” 

Sprout collecting an asparagus shoot. A robotic tool based at the bottom of Sprout removes the plants. (Courtesy: Muddy Machines) 

Sprout’s arm-like tool saves humans from that back-aching work by efficiently cutting the plant and dropping it onto the vehicle’s conveyor belt, which carries it to a storage container. The tools can be swapped out; Muddy Machines is developing similar tools that will cut and capture zucchini and other crops.  

Unlike C-3PO, Sprout doesn’t speak hundreds of languages, but it does communicate with farmers, who upload a robot’s daily harvesting mission on an app. Sprout leaves its barn and uses GPS to run its routes down harvesting lanes. A farmer can monitor progress in real time. Sprout can also work in tandem with other Sprout machines, communicating their respective performances and giving a farm a workforce to admire.

From CAD Frustration to Design Freedom

To ensure Muddy Machines can continue improving Sprout, the company needed a CAD system that would support its big (autonomous) farming dreams. Its CAD software had to be collaborative, reliable, and cloud-native. Its SOLIDWORKS PDM system seemed anything but that.

For example, Fraser and colleagues would have to contend with a “crazy process” to get access to the system’s built-in bill of materials. They’d first have to create a drawing of an assembly and only through that process could they access the bill of materials, which would then have to be copied and exported to an Excel spreadsheet. Also, his team had to use a VPN to take advantage of SOLIDWORKS. That didn’t always work, leading them to constantly check their work to ensure nothing was lost, but sometimes they’d forget to check. 

“It was not very good, to be honest. It was frustrating,” Fraser said. His team often had to call SOLIDWORKS support to resolve bugs, but more problems would appear. Then there was the realization that the cost of SOLIDWORKS PDM, which already was expensive for the startup, would cost even more as its staff grew. “It was not what we needed to be working very fast.”

Opportunity came calling at the right time. An Onshape team member reached out to Muddy Machines during that peak of frustration and the design and engineering team made the switch. So far, PTC’s Onshape has been every bit the mechanical engineering design CAD that SOLIDWORKS was not. Cloud-native Onshape with built-in PDM has been dependable and the ideal platform to support Muddy Machines’ need for nimble, responsive development.

That was apparent during a smooth transfer of legacy files, prototypes, and historical models to Onshape and continued with “boot camp” instructional training that got Fraser’s team familiar with the platform. Unlike its constant outreach to SOLIDWORKS, the team hasn’t had to contact Onshape customer service that often.

When it does connect to Onshape, it’s simply a matter of opening a ticket and having “someone from anywhere in the world look at it,” without having to accommodate them via VPN. “It’s much faster with Onshape,” Fraser said.

An engineer using Onshape Onshape’s PDM improved workflows. (Courtesy: Muddy Machines)  

The Future Looks Bright on the Farm

Fraser’s team is constantly iterating designs so that Sprout can meet the changing demands of farming. 

“The stuff we do is challenging,” he said. “We learn about harvesting and then try to turn that into new ways of designing a product.”

Take the robotic arm harvesting tool. It was hard to develop, and each iteration is difficult to make because of the nature of carefully freeing plants from soil. An asparagus plant is close to the soil, which poses a challenge for the tool’s shears. The team needs to keep making small changes, incorporating what it has learned while preserving the previous version. Saving work was always challenging with SOLIDWORKS but not so with Onshape. 

“Branching on Onshape has helped with that,” Fraser said. “We can duplicate a workspace without compromising the original model. There are tons of branches that come off the design and help us develop quickly.” 

Saving work on Onshape, for that matter, never has Fraser and team second-guessing. Saving work is automated. “We never lose anything,” Fraser said. “SOLIDWORKS — there were a lot of crashes, and you’d lose three hours of work because you’d be so immersed in it that you’d forget to hit save.”

Another “huge” advantage of Onshape is how it keeps track of parts. Before, Fraser’s team had to constantly consult a spreadsheet to reference part numbers anytime they wanted to make a new one. With Onshape, that process is automated; numbers are generated without having to stop work and manually check what’s already been created. “I’m a big fan of that,” he said. 

Fraser also appreciates how he and his team can take Onshape with them, whether it’s in the company workshop or on a farm. When building and assembling robots in a workshop, they’re contending with five robot systems, each with at least 10,000 parts. “You need good building instructions, so we build with the CAD in front of us on iPads. ‘What bit goes there? Which component am I looking at?’” Similarly, it’s advantageous to have Onshape available on a mobile device when they visit farms. They can compare design needs with farming realities on the spot.

Asparagus collected by Sprout A binful of asparagus, freshly picked by a Sprout robot. (Courtesy: Muddy Machines)

What’s next for Muddy Machines? New Sprout prototypes and continued improvements of what’s already on U.K. asparagus farms.

“We are starting to go from a small number of robots to thinking about how we’re going to make the next hundred,” Fraser said. “There are going to be challenges that we will need to solve in the design but we’re happy we’ll be doing that with Onshape.”

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