Saga Robotics: Meet the Robots Making our Strawberries more Sustainable

Picture a farm where robots work through the night, eliminating disease without a single drop of chemicals. It sounds like science fiction, but it's already happening on strawberry farms across Britain and vineyards throughout California, thanks to a remarkable robot called Thorvald. Thorvald is an autonomous robot that uses UVC light as a preventative treatment for crop diseases.

Thorvald's unique horseshoe design allows it to glide autonomously through polytunnels and vineyards at night, emitting precisely calibrated UVC light that damages mildew spores while leaving crops unharmed. The modular platform not only eliminates chemical use but also collects valuable crop data through onboard cameras and machine learning, giving farmers unprecedented insights for harvest planning and yield optimization. Saga Robotics treated roughly 20% of the British strawberry harvest this year, and is expanding to 30% next season. 

We traveled to Lincoln, the UK headquarters of Saga Robotics, to meet Chief Product Officer Damian Flynn and his engineering team. Discover how cutting-edge robotics and digital technology are reshaping the future of sustainable agriculture.

Find out more about Saga Robotics here.

Find out more about Onshape here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive Producer is Jacqui Cook. Location recording by Helen Lennard. Sound design and editing by Louise Morris. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

 Welcome to the Third Angle where digital tech and robotics are revolutionising agriculture.

I am your host, Paul Hayes from Industrial Software Company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC Technology.

In this episode, we're heading to the East Midlands, the UK headquarters of Saga Robotics. Welcome to Lincoln on a slightly gray, but thankfully warm day. When most of us picture a farm, its tractors rolling across fields, or workers bent over rows of crops. But Saga Robotics has a different vision, fields lined with fruit plants while a sleek white robot glides quietly around them.

It's the farm of the future: efficient, automated, and designed to help growers boost yields while cutting chemical use and in parts of the UK and US. That future is already here, thanks to a robot called Thorvald. My name is Damian Flynn and I'm the Chief Product Officer here at Saga Robotics. 

We have a pretty global footprint, so we have services and engineering in Norway. We have R&D and operations for strawberries in the UK and in California. We have some R&D and operations teams running the robots in California wine grapes. So at Saga Robotics, we are attempting to solve two big problems for growers. First around the use of chemicals on farms, but also around the reliance on labour.

At Saga, we are really trying to make automation and chemical free treatment the norm. This is the GTECH building. It's the UK R&D headquarters for Saga Robotics, where we design and develop Thorvald, the world's first autonomous robot that uses UVC Light as a preventative treatment to powdery mildew.

Next to climate change, agriculture and food security is probably the next biggest problem the world faces. And so being able to make an impact and being able to help growers, help farmers, help our customers achieve more sustainable, more economic solutions is what really drives me. 

The idea originated in a university lab. Lars Grimstad and Pål Johan met at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. They bonded over robotics and began experimenting with UVC light as a way to control crop diseases. They founded Saga Robotics in 2016. You might be familiar with UVA and UVB. But what exactly is UVC and how could it replace chemicals on farms?

UVC light is an incredibly short wavelength, and it is almost completely filtered out by the atmosphere. And life on Earth hasn't evolved to be resistant against the harmful effects of UVC light, which means it has properties where if controlled, you can use it to attack the DNA of mildew spores and other diseases that are in the air, on the plant and kind of all around the crop.

We use this at night because it is the blue light in the atmosphere, in the daytime that repairs the spores, so if you use the bulbs at night, you damage the mildew spores and they stay suppressed for longer making the overall treatment a lot more effective. Powdery mildew is a particular problem for lots of growers, especially in berries.

Berries are a high value crop, it's attacks yields and the way that strawberries are grown, or the berries are grown is they're kind of squished into quite tight spaces, often in polytunnels, and it makes perfect environments for mould, mildew, other diseases. And so it's kind of just an accepted norm that growers will use a whole variety of chemicals in the protection and maintenance of their crop. Fungicides, pesticides, herbicides. There's a whole suite of different chemicals that kind of go into our food on farms. 

And growers don't like using chemicals, right? They are expensive, they're often hard to administer. They're inaccurate. Generally, there's an immunity problem so often a lot of crops, the more you spray, the more you have to spray. And so, growers ultimately want a chemical free farm. So one of the things that we look to do at Saga is to really look at what clean technologies are available. UVC is an incredibly safe technology. It attacks the mildew spores, which are incredibly delicate, but ultimately leaves the rest of the plant alone. In my view, it's a much cleaner and sustainable alternative to the fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, which are currently used, which again, I don't think people appreciate.

So Saga over the last 10 years has been experimenting and generating an awful lot of knowhow into how to effectively apply UVC for the treatment of mildew and other diseases. What we know is that you can't just generate a UVC or use a UVC lamp and protect a plant from mildew. You have to really know what you are doing around the dosage levels, and it's around the frequency of treatment, and that varies between plant, between crop, between variety, between atmospheric conditions.

We also have some clever features in our robot that really enhance the application of UVC light and helps apply it to the plant efficiently. So you'll notice that our robot has this kind of horseshoe curve design, and that's so that it's got wheels on each side of the row and then an arch in between. We cover the arch full of bulbs, and that helps get as much light into the plant as possible. 

If you've enjoyed strawberries and cream in the UK this summer, there's a good chance UVC light was part of the process. Saga Robotics technology was used on roughly 20% of the British Strawberry Harvest this year. Next year we'll be treating around 30% of the UK strawberry harvest. So it's more like one in three strawberries that you eat next year will be treated by UVC light.

Which brings us to Thorvald itself. The machine at the heart of this next agricultural revolution. On the ground floor of Saga Robotics Lincoln UK headquarters the workshop is buzzing. Engineers bent over open machines, tinkering with new parts and testing upgrades for the next season.

Yeah, that's its little boot up tune. So that little startup noise we heard is a bit of an Easter egg. I'm told that is the start of a Norwegian drinking song. So this is Robot 86. It's a strawberry variant, and I guess the first thing you notice about Thorvald is it's got this kind of horseshoe over the arch design. It travels over the arch of the strawberry tables and what we do is we line the complete arch with UVC bulbs, which actually admits a really intense UVC light that kills mildew spores. The robot itself, it's incredibly maneuverable, so the majority of strawberries are produced in the UK in polytunnels, and this is incredibly compact and challenging environment to operate in.

And so the design that we have here. You can see we've got these four wheels that are independently driven and they can swivel on their own axes as well. So the robot can not only move forward and backwards, it can also crab side to side, which helps it move from row to row. It can also spin on a complete 360 degree access.

So this is Callum. He is our mechatronics team lead. So I work on, design of the robot. I coordinate the electronics development and the integration of that with the software and also the mechanics. So now the robot is on, the software is all loaded. So I've just pressed the reset button to reset the emergency stop circuitry. I've got the remote control turned on and I can press forwards. The wheels will start moving forwards. I can give it a little bit of left, a little bit of right, and the machine will react to that. 

This is a very familiar system for controlling things people are familiar with. So, games controls and remote control toys, things like that. It's important to us that this machinery is very usable for people who are not so familiar with it.

Currently we're operating in two main markets. The first is UK strawberries. The other area that we are operating in is in the wine grape region of California. So the technology that works for strawberries is also incredibly effective for wine grapes. So we have a small team operating robots in California. We're covering about 1500 acres of Californian wine grape this year, and essentially it's the same technology. It's a slightly adjusted robot. The light rig hangs a little bit lower to account for the position of the grapes. 

So Thorvald is a platform, so there isn't a huge amount of difference between this wine variant and this strawberry variant, they're mainly the same robot, just with a couple of kind of bolt-on additions to account for the different crop geometries.

In saga robotics warehouse the new Thorvald prototypes are already showing what chemical free farming could look like. But that's only half the story. The real breakthrough Thorvald also reduces growers' reliance on manual labour by automating key tasks. One robot tackling two of farming's biggest challenges at once. 

So there is a universal truth that labour is not getting any more available or any cheaper. So how can we think our way out of this problem? How can we use technology to reduce, as much as possible, our reliance on labour. And generally on a farm, like in lots of other industries, there's lots of hard, repetitive and often dangerous things that happen on a farm, which could be replaced really well by automation.

Automation really comes into its own when you use it for doing things that humans are not very well designed to do. For the last hundred years farmers have used large, manually driven tractors, harvesters, all this kind of large agricultural equipment, which makes their farms incredibly productive. But there's relatively little automation on farms, and so a huge part of Saga's mission is to cross that chasm to bring automation and robotics onto the farm in order to provide economic sustainability to our growers, but also environmental sustainability as well. 

So lots of these robots are electric and a lot lighter than these kind of large agricultural vehicles. So ticking those two boxes is what Saga tried to do. Sounds like the perfect fix, right? Well, not quite. Getting Thorvald from the lab to the field meant tackling some big hurdles first. There were two key challenges. The first is technical. So farms are incredibly chaotic environments for robotics. Lots of things happen on the farm that you wouldn't expect. There is wind and there is rain, and there is mud, and there is animals, and there are people, and there are ramblers and there are pallets in the way, and there's cars that people have parked in places that you wouldn't expect.

In some of our locations we've had mountain lions and rattlesnakes. It's incredibly chaotic. So to actually develop a robot that can navigate its way around all of that stuff. And work reliably is a real challenge. And the second is the kind of commercial challenge, right? Growers, generally are pretty cash poor.

When growers come to plan their crop protection strategies, they should be thinking about how can I automate this? But also how can I farm more sustainably. And I think often growers have a choice. They can either farm sustainably or they can make money. And I think what we're trying to do at SAGA is show growers that you can have both and you don't need to choose.

We are asking our growers to make two big changes to their farming practices. We're asking them to change from chemicals to UVC light, which is a risk in itself for them because chemicals have been around for a long time and they're used to those practices. But we're also asking them to change from machinery to automation.

And often those two big leaps are difficult leaps for a business to take because there's lots of risk in them. So one of the business models that we operate is a kind of farming as a service. So the robots that we build, we own, we maintain, and we operate them for our growers on their farms, and then we charge them a per area fee.

And this really works for a lot of our growers. It means they haven't got to spend a large amount of capital and run the robots themselves. They can use farming as a service as a bit of a first step into using this new technology on their farms. And in the future, what we're trying to do is make this technology the norm.

And the benefits don't stop there. Thorvald isn't just treating crops. It's also quietly gathering a new kind of intelligence about them, offering farmers insights they've never had before. UVC is the core function of Thorvald, our robot, but one of the other things we're doing is collecting data. So we have cameras in the robot that are taking video of the crop as it rolls past doing its UVC protection.

We have trained a machine learning model to then count the crop. So in strawberries, we count the strawberries and we give them a ripeness assessment. In wine grape, we count the grape clusters. And we can take all that data, amalgamate it into a platform and give it to the grower who can use it to estimate what they will harvest when it comes to harvest time, but they can also plan their marketing and also plan their labour as well. So it's an incredibly powerful tool, and that's one of the advantages you get when you put automation in an area where there is none. 

Human-based processes are very difficult to collect data from. People walk the fields and count berries, you know, these are huge areas, so typically they can't do the whole farm. They'll generally do between one and 5% and then extrapolate that, which is a pretty poor way of collecting data on what's on your farm. So, you know, Thorvald is in the crop anyway. You can get a hundred percent data collection from a robot.

My name's Sebastian. I'm in the mechatronics team here at Saga UK. So I'm mainly mechanical focussed, and right now I've got a desk full of our steering motor units, and some of these are the prototypes that we have for a larger variant of one of our wine robots. So at the moment, we've just received some of the new housings for these motors and I'm just assembling everything, checking it all, making sure it turns nicely, and getting it ready to try out on one of the robots we have. 

We're continuously improving our Thorvald platform. So we look at what farmers are looking for and what sort of terrain we're facing. A larger incline or some of the bumps and lumps that we might come across on certain farms, then we can allow for certain design changes. We are pretty swift with that as well, thanks to our seasonal schedule that we have at work. We kind of have an off season during the winter, which allows for a lot of design time, and we use that to kind of grow and evolve and develop the robot further so that when the next season rolls around, we are ready for the next year.

When we talk to our growers at the end of the season, they're fortunately very happy with us. So all of our growers are sticking with us. We're actually expanding our operations into many more acres and hectares next year. One of the things that they also mention, which is difficult to quantify or at least difficult to prove, is a few of them report increases in yield as well. You know, actually producing more sellable crop per square metre. 

Saga Robotics plans to take Thorvald beyond strawberries and grapevines, expanding its reach across more hectares and a variety of crops. With modular design that allows a single robot to handle multiple tasks, Thorvald is becoming an increasingly versatile tool for growers.

For Damien, this work isn't just about technology, it's part of a larger mission. It's a very rewarding task, and also one of the most important missions that we have as a society is to make sure our food supply is sustainable and produce food in the way that meets the needs of the country. I think the key to robotics for the future is not having to modify the environment to be sympathetic to robots. Robots should just work in the world that we have around us. And so in 10 years time, I'm expecting to see a lot more sophistication around these robots and much more use of them because they can just be used in the environments that we use every day.

That was Damian Flynn, Chief Product Officer at Saga Robotics. Now it's time to meet our expert Jon Hirschtick from PTC. In robotics, speed and innovation are crucial. How has OnShape helped Saga Robotics teams collaborate more effectively and bring ideas to life faster? Saga has distributed engineering teams in the UK and Norway and the USA.

They used to struggle to collaborate across different time zones using Legacy CAD and PDM tools like SolidWorks and Autodesk's Fusion 360, and maybe other tools, because they're based on files there are delays with file sharing and that caused version conflicts, which leads to missed deadlines. Now with PTCs OnShape and our cloud native platform, we've eliminated those barriers. Engineers can work together live in real time, no matter where they are in the world, no matter which time zone they're in, without worrying about outdated files or locally installing things or local file copies. 

So this collaborative efficiency has been key to rapidly upgrading their product, helping them continuously deliver improvements to customers more quickly. So looking ahead, how do you see cloud native design tools like Onshape influencing the next generation of robotics design John? OnShape is going to influence and improve the next generation of robotics design in a lot of ways. OnShape unique, cloud native platform for CAD and PDM gives realtime data access, browser-based collaboration and built-in simulation other tools.

What it means is robotics teams can do faster prototyping, they can work in real time. So the mechanical design team, print, circuit boards, wiring, they're all in the same model at the same time editing, no more delays. The power of these tools for robotics is profound. Teams can use these features to work faster and be more innovative. They reduce IT overhead. 

This is an enormous improvement in information security because we're not copying IP to local computers. All stays secure in one place in the cloud. We can also allow teams to scale engineering capacity without worrying about installations, special hardware, licensee limits. The huge advantage is in the world of AI.

So, Saga Robotics, they've been successful. They raised $11 million to scale production, expand globally. They see the flexibility of the future proof design tools and OnShape, and I think that the robotics industry generally is seeing the impact that OnShape can make on the future of robotics design. I think the AI point you raised, John, is really interesting. I mean, we have a lot of conversations with our customers about how AI and engineering and manufacturing is gonna impact them and what should they be expecting, and I think within the OnShape suite, it's a pragmatic set of tools that are going to deliver repeatable value over and over again, and a reliable set of results.

So, you know, less hallucination, more real time insights, more efficiency for the engineers. Is that a fair statement? Yes, I think you're right. And I do believe that, going back to one of your earlier points around the cross-disciplinary design, the fact that the mechanical teams are working with the software teams, the firmware teams, you know, the people that are doing the wiring looms. That full definition of the product is so critical for those technologies like robotics, where all of these variables, all of these systems need to work in complete harmony and also get designed in complete harmony as well. So we're covering all parts of the product, not just the physical stuff, but obviously the software, the bits and the bytes as well.

Absolutely. And we typically see when teams switch from legacy tools like SolidWorks and SolidWorks PDM to OnShape for CAD and PDM, we'll see two to three times as many people on the team using CAD and PDM with OnShape than they could with say, the old style SolidWorks stuff - for all the reasons we've just talked about.

So I think that that extends the reach, if you will, the real time digital innovation tool set to cross-disciplinary workers and breadth across the organisation and in depth, and even can go into functions like purchasing and sales and so forth. So an incredible impact on robotics companies and other kinds of companies. Right across the enterprise, so really good for the future.

Thanks to Jon and to Damian and our producer Helen for taking us behind the scenes of Saga Robotics. Please rate, review and subscribe to our biweekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts, and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes. 

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This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive Producer is Jackie Cook. Location recording by Helen Leonard, sound design and editing by Louise Morris and music by Rowan Bishop.