As Singapore strives for greater food resilience, local food producers and manufacturers are exploring different innovative technologies in automation, Internet of Things (IoT) and robotics to attain higher efficiency and generate better yield with lesser resources.
Recognising the huge potential for the agriculture sector to grow by tapping into new technologies, IPI and Singapore Industrial Automation Association (SIAA) jointly organised a Agritech roundtable for local technology owners and stakeholders from the local farming ecosystem on 29 June 2021.
Four homegrown infocomm and technology companies, Augmentus, Chloropy, Datakrew and MyrLabs presented their solutions for more efficient urban farming. For example, Augmentus Director Daryl Lim introduced their no-code, no-CAD, high ROI AI-robotics platform that allows rapid programming of industrial and collaborative robots for automated harvesting and inspections. Dr Sumanta Bose, CEO of Datakrew, delved deeper into an Agri-IoT data acquisition, transmission and analytics platform with digital twin, for valuable insights into a farm’s daily operations.
SIAA Members, SPTel and Linkwise also shared their ready-to-use IoT-as-a-Service platform which utilises soil, light, humidity, pH and NPK (nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium) sensors.
These AI and data-driven technology solutions were curated to address various challenges faced by existing agriculture farms in Singapore as well as new entrants such as NextGen Farms. Co-founder Balajee Potala shared NextGen Farms’ vision to efficiently build, operate and scale up a plant factory in Singapore over a two-year period, using automation for all processes from seeding to packing as well as some of their technology needs which included technologies to monitor the quality of their harvest from farm to fork.
