UK robotics start-ups using AI to solve pressing world problems show their ideas in Hong Kong
At the Great Festival of Innovation in Admiralty last month, inventors from two UK robotics firms revealed new ideas based on artificial intelligence that could help countries facing problems over food sustainability and ageing populations
“Robots are viewed as big and scary things that are either going to take your job or kill you,” jokes Ben Scott-Robinson, founder of The Small Robot Company. “What we want to do is completely opposite to that ethos; there is an opportunity for robots to make people’s lives better.”
The start-up is one of two robotics firms that attended Hong Kong’s Great Festival of Innovation last month. The other, Consequential Robotics, manufactures robots that promise to transform health-care services for the elderly and disabled.
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Scott-Robinson has a concept for futuristic farming that involves three artificially intelligent robots called Tom, Dick and Harry, whose job it is to take care of sowing seeds, monitoring plants’ health and tackling weeds.
“Robotics can completely change the farming industry,” the 44-year-old says. He explains that one of the main problems with farming is that ploughing with heavy tractors is energy-intensive and rinse the soil of its nutrients. The spraying of pesticides, meanwhile, is killing off pollinators and affecting biodiversity.
Tom, who would live on the farm full-time, is a monitoring robot. He roams the farm scanning crop-by-crop, checking plant health and looking out for weeds before uploading his findings to a cloud operating system. When plants aren’t looking healthy, Dick goes out to feed the ground at the root of the plant with nutrients and kill weeds with lasers. “You use 95 per cent less pesticide and none of it sits on the ground,” Scott-Robinson says.
