Bonsai Robotics announced a $ 10.5 million seed round

Bonsai Robotics will use the funds to accelerate its product roadmap and invest in both hiring and sales & marketing. Bonsai Robotics is focused on environments where traditional GPS, stereovision, time of flight sensors and LIDAR-based autonomy systems fail. Its first market is orchards – specifically nut orchards – a space that’s been beleaguered by severe labor shortages, environmental pressure and price pressure, and so challenging and adverse that even decades old autosteer technology used in row crops does not work.

Bonsai Robotics solutions are integrated with OEM farm equipment to allow vehicles to autonomously traverse orchards without human operators. Because Bonsai Robotics software leverages AI SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) technology built using a data set of tens of thousands of acres, it can operate in adverse conditions including remote areas with dust, debris, heavy vibration and unreliable GPS coverage.

Harvesting prunes

The first product to utilize Bonsai’s tech is Shockwave X, produced by Orchard Machinery Corporation. OMC’s history dates back to 1961, when it began producing hydraulic tree shakers to harvest prunes. Bonsai’s system effectively turns OMC’s Shockwave line into autonomous harvesters.

“OMC is currently taking initial orders for the Bonsai autonomy service on the ShockwaveX,” says CEO of Bonsai Robotics Tyler Niday. “We have been collecting data for all 14 months we’ve been in existence as a company, which meant that upon delivery of the first ShockwaveX we were running the autonomy system on it within two weeks, with special thanks to Trinitas Farming for giving us an orchard where we could safely test to the absolute limit.”