Agrorobotica is an innovative start-up created in June 2017 that deals with precision agriculture and farming management. The company’s strengths are the design, production and marketing of agricultural monitoring systems and the developing powerful learning algorithms. It has developed SpyFly, a pest trap to be installed in the field that can: photograph, recognize and count harmful insects and transmit the results obtained in real time via smartphone and website: a benefit for the environmental sustainability, agro-food chain and consumer health. At the end of 2018 Agrorobotica joined the acceleration program of the TH2 Milan incubator and from now it will be supported by Fondazione Social Venture Giordano Dell’Amore – the strategic and operational Foundation of Fondazione Cariplo in the impact investing sector – which invested in the enterprise 300,000 euro.

How Does Spyfly work?

Andrea Sozzi Sabatini – CEO of Agrorobotica:

Their flagship product is SpyFly, a robotic trap capable of attracting, capturing and recognizing pests and parasitic insects that are harmful to crops through sophisticated AI algorithms.

Each Spyfly is powered independently by solar panels and doubles as a weather gauge, collating information on the evolution of insects with respect to the climatic conditions.

Thanks to the technology developed, the farmer receives warning messages in the event of the presence of harmful insects allowing a prompt and effective intervention.

SpyFly is equipped with proprietary auto-adaptive algorithms that combine data collected from insect catches with those detected by installed sensors. The development of the Artificial Intelligence with which it is equipped is aimed at combining the data collected from multiple traps in order to create forecast models able to self-learn based on the place where they are installed. The spread of SpyFly represents a real revolution in the agricultural world as regards the monitoring of the state of health of crops and the integrated control of their pests.

How about the impact of Agrorobotica?

Contrast to food waste caused by the lost of harvest and reduction of the improper use of pesticides in crops, are two of the main factors of the positive environmental impact generated by Agrorobotica.

The main problems affecting crops are the damages caused by parasitic insects: depending on the type of crop and vintages, the losses of the crop – in particular concerning vine and olive or fruit trees – fluctuate on average from 20

“According to our investment logics, we have placed trust in the potential impact generated by Agrorobotica, for its ability to offer a targeted solution to a widespread problem in the environmental field. It is known, how the impossibility of predicting the damage caused to the crops by certain species of insects, is the cause from origin of an improper or massive use of pesticides, as well as the waste of food and economic resources. The monitoring system developed by Agrorobotica favors a targeted and sustainable use of agrochemicals and allows to protect the environmental safety of operators and consumers, for the benefit of the sustainability of the agro-food chain.” – explained Marco Gerevini, Member of the Board of Directors of Fondazione Social Venture GDA. 

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