Artificial intelligence camera wins RHASS innovation award

A ‘retrainable, smart-camera vision system’, developed in Scotland and now being deployed to eliminate rogue potatoes in Dutch onion crops has been awarded a Silver medal in the coveted Royal Highland Show Technical Innovation Awards.

SKAi (pronounced: Sky) – SoilEssentials KORE Artificial Intelligence platform – is the brainchild of Forfar based precision farming specialist, SoilEssentials. Essentially the SKAi system utilises smart cameras, trained in the recognition of target weed species, to control an agricultural crop sprayer as it passes over a field. Initially utilised to target dock infestations in grassland, SKAi is now being put to work in high value arable crops.

Gregor Welsh, of SoilEssentials commented:
“We are delighted to have received this Technical Innovation award from the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society. The award will be displayed with great pride on our trade stand at the forthcoming Royal Highland Show, where we will be happy to showcase SKAi to visitors.”
“The detection and management of weeds in crops has long been a challenge for those hoping to use precision farming technology to guide their spray applications. The artificial intelligence we have developed with SKAi means that the detection and targeted spot spraying of individual weed species has now become a real and viable option.”

“Working in unison and integrating with existing GPS and sprayer systems, SKAi can be trained to recognise and map a target species for individual treatment, as opposed to blanket spraying across whole fields. The system is poised to revolutionise farming practices, vastly reduce agri-chemical usage (up to 90%), increase efficiencies and reduce costly inputs.”

“We envisage huge environmental and farm business benefits from growers utilising SKAi.”

“Our first commercial customer for SKAi was a specialist onion grower in Holland. When potatoes are harvested it is not uncommon for some to evade the machinery and remain in the ground, these then spring up as undesirable ‘volunteers’ the following year. Our Dutch customer was experiencing significant problems from ‘volunteer’ potato plants amongst onion crops; but the scattered nature of the volunteers throughout the crop made them impossible to spray with a conventional system. This was, however, an ideal situation to bring SKAi into play as the grower can easily train SKAi to differentiate between potato plants and onion plants.”

“SKAi is a true, artificial intelligence system, in that it learns and makes decisions as it works. At present SKAi has full functionality when the crop and target species are off very different appearance, eg broad leaved weeds in grassland and potatoes in onion crops; however, we believe that as the intelligence develops, growers will be able to deploy SKAi to situations where the weed and the crop are of very similar appearance, potentially even grass weeds in cereal crops.”

SKAi will be on display alongside the AgBot – the first fully autonomous ‘robot’ tractor to be brought to the Scottish market – and other precision farming hardware and software in the SoilEssentials marquee on Avenue Q at the Royal Highland Show, 23rd-26th June.