EarthSense Wins Funding from America’s Seed Fund
April 13, 2020. CHAMPAIGN, IL – EarthSense, Inc., known for their innovative autonomous robotics and machine learning platform, has won prestigious Phase II funding from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business and Innovative Research Programs, also known as “America’s Seed Fund”. This award follows the successful execution of a previous Phase I R&D project funded by the same program. During 2018 and 2019, EarthSense leveraged a Small Business Innovation Research award from NSF, venture investment, and revenues to successfully demonstrate the technical feasibility of their TerraSentia™ high-throughput field phenotyping system.
The Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer Award will enable EarthSense, working with their collaborators at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, to accelerate further innovation in their robotics, autonomy, and edge analytics technologies to achieve large-scale deployment of TerraSentia for agricultural research and product development.
“Agricultural productivity, profitability, and resiliency need to be improved all around the world to provide good food for the growing human population. TerraSentia is helping create a stronger foundation for agriculture by enabling faster and lower cost creation of the next generation of crops that are more productive, sustainable, and resilient,” said EarthSense co-founder and CEO Chinmay Soman. “This award from the National Science Foundation is an extraordinary vote of confidence in our technology and our long-term vision.”
EarthSense has differentiated their robotics platform right from its inception by tightly integrated development of the three key elements necessary for real world success:
simple, rugged ground robots with low-cost sensors
robust autonomy algorithms that enable long-term autonomous navigation, and
innovative machine-vision and machine-learning algorithms that extract real-world insights from sensor data.
“EarthSense has created a unique robotics and machine learning platform with a broad range of applications, starting with agriculture,” said Girish Chowdhary, co-founder and CTO of EarthSense, as well as Donald Biggar Willet Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. “This prestigious funding from the National Science Foundation will drive the next major jump in capabilities of our robots to navigate autonomously and analyze field data on-site. We are excited about creating this next generation robotics and AI platform that will help society sustainably manage agriculture and other planetary resources.” Prof. Chowdhary is also the Director of the Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the University of Illinois.
Prof. Vikram Adve, Donald B. Gillies Professor in Computer Science and Co-Director of the Center for Digital Agriculture at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, will collaborate with EarthSense on the project. Prof. Adve is known for his numerous influential innovations in Computer Science, including the widely used LLVM Compiler Infrastructure. “Optimizing algorithms and compilers for efficient edge computing on these ultracompact robots is an exciting challenge.” said Prof. Adve. “Agriculture offers a unique sandbox for creating this emerging computing platform while simultaneously addressing a critical societal challenge.”
Major agricultural companies, including Corteva Agriscience and KWS, as well as other private- and public-sector organizations have piloted TerraSentia in the US, Brazil, Chile, Australia, France, and India in 2018, 2019, and 2020. Their interest is driven by an unmet need for essential data about under-canopy plant traits and plant health from large-scale field trials. The lack of this data is a critical bottleneck that is slowing down the creation of more sustainable agronomic practices, effective crop protection and nutrition products, and next generation crops varieties.
This two-year grant from NSF will enable EarthSense to accelerate final product development and achieve rapid global deployment of the TerraSentia platform, as well as create the next generation of their robots for farmers around the world.
About EarthSense, Inc.: EarthSense is creating dramatic new possibilities in agriculture with their innovative platform that tightly integrates autonomous robotics, machine-learning, and field management. Their first robot—TerraSentia—is helping accelerate crop improvement and agricultural product development by providing large quantities of accurate in-field plant trait data rapidly and at low cost, especially for under-canopy traits that cannot be obtained by other methods. EarthSense is now working with farmers to create robots that enable sustainable and profitable agriculture around the world. For more information, visit earthsense.co.
About America’s Seed Fund: America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $1.75 million to support research and development (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.1 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering. For more information, visit seedfund.nsf.gov.