Yamaha Motor Co., Ltd. has signed a joint development agreement on smart agriculture with Australian startup The Yield Technology Solutions. Through this joint development, the company aims to help improve agricultural productivity in the utilization of digital technology and robotics.

As an agricultural technology company, The Yield is on a mission to transform food and farming practices with scalable digital technology. The Yield uses internet of things (IoT), data science, and artificial intelligence (AI) to power its technology to solve real challenges at farm level and throughout the food chain.

Its Sensing+ microclimate solution combines sensors and analytics to provide information and predictions that help growers make important on-farm decisions, like when to irrigate, feed, plant, protect and harvest.

Combining Robotics, Analytical Technologies

Yamaha Motor has automation solutions in the agricultural field using robotics technology applications, like an agricultural unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). A trial is aimed to improve harvest prediction accuracy by gathering growth stage data through visual data collection. It also aims to optimize spray effectiveness by integrating robotics technologies with weather data and spray guidelines to maximize autonomous spray efficiency.

The trial combines these solutions with The Yield’s analytics technologies to further promote business development in the smart agriculture field. Further, in collaboration with global premium wine company, Treasury Wine Estates (TWE), the companies aim to improve development speed and accuracy by conducting a large field data collection and experiments in TWE vineyards in Australia and the West Coast of America.