Euronews Tech Talks sits down with Lars Grimstad, CTO and co-founder of the Norwegian agri-tech company Saga Robotics, to learn how its robots treat plants to reduce the use of chemicals.

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Robot farmers? These robots are treating plants with UV lights instead of toxic chemicals. Driving autonomously, they are designed to help farmers work less and more safely. Using cameras, they can also count fruits and predict yield.

“Our main offering is that we treat plants with UV lights. So instead of using chemicals, we just use lights. But for that to work, you have to do it pretty frequently. And it’s also most effective at night, so it’s really a perfect application for robots, right? So as robots, they don’t need sleep, they can just drive around at night and treat the plants a couple of times a week. The company says robots like this could help humans work more safely. Instead of driving around with big heavy tractors impacting soil and so on, you have autonomous robots, like one person can be in charge of a fleet of robots rather than having a single driver per machine. And this high-frequency farming allows us to approach farming in a new way. Its developers say it’s easy to deploy the robots on any farm. It is actually built up of modules. It’s, it’s more or less like Lego for field robots. You can take these modules and you can configure them into a robot that makes sense for a given environment. And for strawberry farms and vineyards, the way we have configured this robot is that it has kind of an arch-shaped frame, so it kind of drives over the plants where you can treat the plants from all sides. While robots may help ease farmers’ work, some robotics experts say a fair distribution of technology should be ensured. If all these machines are owned by private companies, we are going to have a big problem. So I think that it’s very important that European Commission really start thinking about how to tackle this without losing the economical value that it has, and so that the welfare is properly distributed. The robots are currently used in strawberry and grape fields in Norway, the UK, and the US.