Tortuga AgTech

Thank you Sun World International for hosting and supporting us, and thank you Ben Palone and all the growers attending for your excitement and feedback! It's clear that labor availability is a massive issue in table grapes and we're excited to be pioneering a robotic solution.

101,207! Yesterday, two crews of Tortuga “Model F” robots picked over 100,000 berries in a single shift on one of our customer farms, The Summer Berry Company. We did this with 96% accuracy — better than humans at detecting ripeness and avoiding bruising. This single-shift milestone is the outcome of a massive jump in robot performance this year. We’ve 3X’d our picking volumes from 2023 and set records every month (nearly every week). This latest record surpassed the previous record – set 6 days earlier at THE NEW FOREST FRUIT CO. Here’s a photo of our robots about to be “put to bed” in their containers after a long day of work. Congratulations to the on-site teams, and we expect more records to fall in the coming months! 

Thank you to Shai Albaranes and Orbia for having us on Expand Your Horizons. Check out the full episode to learn more about Tortuga's unique approach to AI and robotics.

Our fleet of robots can operate indoors or outdoors, day or night. This excellent drone shot shows ~40 robots picking on an autumn day at THE NEW FOREST FRUIT CO. Watch it in 4K resolution to get the full effect of what a day of robotic harvesting looks like! https://lnkd.in/gRcRSHj8

"Your robots can pick fruit, but can they trim our plants?" We've gotten this question from growers for years, and we can now say - YES! Many types of fruiting plants need trimming. Some, like strawberries, grow shoots (called "runners") that would help a wild plant grow, but are targets for pests and wasted energy on a commercial farm. Growers want to trim these runners, but labor shortages and costs make the job harder to get done. By applying our frontier AI Robotics and making some minor tweaks, we have now proven we can precisely trim runners! With thoughtful effort, we believe this will help us develop trimming services across multiple crops. But first, we'll aim to cut runners at a farm scale starting next summer season.

A quick time-lapse of Tortuga's UV-C service at THE NEW FOREST FRUIT CO. in the UK. In the past few years, agronomists have shown that you can prevent powdery mildew outbreaks by shining the right amount of UV-C light on plants at night. Tortuga's robots shine UV-C light on the plants while driving themselves autonomously up and down the rows. Operators change the robots to the next available row and do it all over again - treating a 2.5Ha glasshouse in ~4-5 hours. The result is happy plants and a very aesthetically pleasing robot "flying formation!" Glasshouses can have different "rail" configurations (the metal pipes on the ground), and because Tortuga's robots drive themselves on their own wheels, they can operate over the top of rails, with no rails, or with one wheel inside the rail and one wheel out. This flexibility is critical to adapt to all the many different farms that exist. The same robots were picking strawberries outside in the fields the very next morning. https://lnkd.in/gR_2ANP9 Learn more at https://lnkd.in/dB9ktYM and https://lnkd.in/gVfw8Hib

As AI dominates today’s headlines, we’re excited to share our philosophy on AI in robotics in our latest blog post. We call the approach Essential AI - a specialized, dynamic, flexible, and efficient way to solve real-world, industrial-scale problems. The AI Renaissance, which generates general artificial intelligence, is here today, but we need an AI Industrial Revolution to truly automate the “dull, dirty and dangerous” tasks that underpin our society. https://lnkd.in/gpKcXq82 Special thanks to Brian Heath and Tim Brackbill for helping co-author this blog and Avidan Ross from Root Ventures and Leo Polovets from Humba Ventures for their invaluable feedback.

Happy Earth Day! 🌍 🌎 🌏 Our mission is the core of everything we do: To build a healthier society, and a thriving planet, through smarter farming. Tortuga’s robots will help farms be more sustainable and resilient by:   - Improving yield and reducing waste during harvest - addressing our massive global food waste problem - Reducing the dependency on fossil-fuel-based chemicals with tools like sterile, sustainable UV-C light treatment and target spraying - Improving food quality, prolonging shelf life, and reducing post-harvest waste with tools like better data collection and forecasting - Improving plant health through better cultivation methods, such as intelligent trimming

As this article in The Guardian points out, the effects of climate change are already here. Different controlled environment structures, such as tunnels and glasshouses, can help make farms more resilient to extreme weather events. Growing in glasshouses, our customers are off to a strong start to the season, delivering high-quality berries into the UK market. https://lnkd.in/gawk2Cyr

Need a tow? One word to describe our custom robot - robust. Here’s a fun video of our Model G robot pulling 1.5 tons at 4 mph up our warehouse ramp (5% slope, 8.75 degree incline). That’s ~3KW of output! https://lnkd.in/gaGNs3qw