Commercial farms face high pesticide usage, which raises environmental concerns, degrades soil health, and incurs regulatory compliance costs. Detecting and treating crop pests early often requires labor-intensive scouting and imprecise chemical applications, limiting sustainability and profitability. BST delivers an autonomous field robot that continuously patrols crop rows, using edge‑trained computer‑vision models to identify pest infestations at the plant level.
Funding
Funding not disclosed
Founders
Product
Problem
Commercial farms face high pesticide usage, which raises environmental concerns, degrades soil health, and incurs regulatory compliance costs. Detecting and treating crop pests early often requires labor-intensive scouting and imprecise chemical applications, limiting sustainability and profitability.
Solution
BST delivers an autonomous field robot that continuously patrols crop rows, using edge‑trained computer‑vision models to identify pest infestations at the plant level. The robot executes targeted, non‑chemical interventions—such as precision mechanical removal or localized biocontrol release—based on real‑time sensor data, thereby reducing or eliminating blanket pesticide sprays. Its navigation stack combines GNSS‑RTK positioning with LiDAR‑based obstacle avoidance to maintain coverage across heterogeneous terrain without human supervision. All detection events and treatment actions are logged to a cloud‑hosted farm management platform, where analytics dashboards provide pest prevalence trends and ROI metrics. OTA software updates and modular payload bays allow growers to adapt the robot to new pest species or emerging control methods. The system is designed for plug‑and‑play deployment, integrating with existing farm IoT ecosystems via standard MQTT and REST APIs.
Target Audience
Primary customers are large‑scale commercial growers and agribusiness enterprises that manage extensive row‑crop or greenhouse operations and seek to lower pesticide inputs while maintaining yield quality. The solution also serves precision‑ag service providers integrating robotic assets into their portfolio.
Features
- AI-powered vision pipeline (CNN + transformer refinement) for species‑level pest identification with <1 cm spatial resolution
- Autonomous navigation using GNSS‑RTK + LiDAR SLAM, supporting 24/7 operation in rows, orchards, and greenhouse aisles
- Modular actuation suite: precision micro‑sprayers for biocontrol agents, high‑speed micro‑cutters for insect removal, and ultrasonic emitters for rodent deterrence
- Edge computing hardware (NVIDIA Jetson AGX) enabling on‑device inference and low‑latency actuation decisions
- Integrated soil‑moisture and micro‑climate sensors to correlate pest activity with environmental conditions
- Cloud‑based fleet management console with real‑time map view, treatment logs, and predictive pest‑outbreak modeling
- Secure data pipeline (TLS, role‑based access) compatible with ISO 11783 (ISOBUS) and MQTT for seamless farm‑software integration
- Remote diagnostics and OTA firmware updates to minimize on‑site maintenance downtime