Innovación, Investigación y Salud
Dic. 22, 2022![](https://chilealimentos.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/robots_strawberries_699px.jpg)
Frutillas/California: robots que bañan los cultivos con luz UV como alternativa a los pesticidas
TRIC Robotics developed its agtech — robots that bathe strawberry crops in UV-C light as an alternative to pesticides — at the University of Delaware. The company then tested the bots in the fields of Fifer Orchards in Kent County, as well as sites in Georgetown and Kernersville. In 2020, TRIC won the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce’s Swim with the Sharks competition.
Recently, the homegrown biz received its biggest funding milestone, and biggest national kudos, yet: $965,000 from the National Science Foundation, which combined with a $625,000 grant from the USDA positions the startup for a promising 2023.
To really get TRIC off the ground, founder Adam Stager decided to make a major move to where 90% of the industry’s strawberries are grown: Central California.
“We ended up taking two of the platforms that we had designed for the East Coast and we just threw them on top of the SUV and came out to California,” Stager said. “That really helped us get through to the R&D phase and we were getting really great results, it was a very visible difference in crop health.”
The biggest challenge has been keeping up with the demand for the tech, which has evolved to be bigger and capable of treating larger crops.
“I just had these little robots that were constantly breaking that I had built in my garage in Delaware and they just weren’t up to the task of going to the large California Farm,” Stager said. “So we just took the plunge and basically bootstrapped a very large version of this, a tractor-sized version of it. This year, we put that on a five-acre farm with the customer paying and started to get good results.”
Full article here: https://technical.ly/startups/tric-robotics-delaware-california-agriculture/
Delaware University/december 20, 2022