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Get to know us

Get to know us

The Thorvald platform emerged from the robotics group at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. By working closely with farmers, the main challenges for producers, both in Norway and internationally, were identified; we saw the need to introduce robots to the agricultural domain for solving critical issues such as labour shortages, sustainability and yield security.

With this foundation, Saga Robotics was established as a company committed to delivering autonomous services for the agricultural industry. Saga Robotics combined a robust mechanical design with intelligent autonomy, and the world's leading agricultural platform, Thorvald, was born.

Meet Thorvald

Thorvald is an autonomous modular robot that can be configured for most agricultural environments. It can operate in open fields, tunnels, orchards and greenhouses and perform tasks such as light treatment for disease management, picking fruits and vegetables, phenotyping, in-field transportation, cutting grass for forage production, spraying and data collection/crop prediction.

Thorvald operates entirely on its own, using advanced navigation methods and artificial intelligence to perform a wide variety of tasks. The robot is small and lightweight, allowing it to perform many tasks on a farm more effectively and for less cost than by using tractors or manual labourers.

Making farming greener while increasing yield and food production

Thorvald has the ability to improve current farming practices in a variety of ways. Tasks requiring manual labour, such as strawberry picking, are made easier by reducing the need to find labourers. This is especially useful in areas struggling to find agricultural labour such as the USA and UK. In addition, Thorvald is small and lightweight compared with modern farming equipment. This means that Thorvald has a small impact on the environment and the quality of farmland due to a reduction in soil compaction. Thorvald can also improve the efficiency and profitability of a farm by doing tasks such as mechanical weeding with machine vision. Robotic weeding using light treatment and precision spraying reduces the amount of pesticides required which is not only a financial bonus but also helps to reduce the environmental impact of agriculture. Finally, agriculture is one of the major industries yet to adopt data analysis techniques to help improve production and efficiency. Farming operations can be improved dramatically by systematic data collection, a task Thorvald can undertake simultaneously with other tasks.

Our mission

To transform farming into a service sector, making agriculture more profitable with reduced risk to the farmer, more environmentally friendly, and to produce cheaper, better and healthier food.

Our vision

To become a leading provider of robotic and knowledge-based farming services.

What makes us different?

Many agricultural robotics companies have created specialized robots that can each do a single task in one type of environment. Thorvald, however, is modular and can be easily assembled to operate in different types of farms and to work with a variety of tools. We have a partner model that permits others to build tools for the robot allowing us to develop applications rapidly. For these reasons we will be able to produce robots on a large scale at an affordable cost. We will be a strong competitor, both with standard farming practices and with other small specialized robots developed for agriculture.

Awards

Norwegian Startup Awards - Best FoodTech Startup 2018 - Sept 18, 2018

Nordic Startup Awards - Best FoodTech Startup 2018 - Oct 30, 2018

Meet the team

Saga Robotics has dedicated employees working across two different locations: Oslo in Norway and Lincoln in the UK. At our offices, you'll find mechanical, robotics and software engineers, research teams, a communications/brand and a finance/business team as well as operations, sales and customer teams. Our team’s multidisciplinary background enables us to address complete farm systems, not just an individual section of the agricultural industry.

Board of Directors

Kjersti Wiklund, Chairman of the Board
Non-Executive Director in several FTSE 250 companies. Former CTO and COO of some of the world’s largest telecom operators.

Pål Wien Espen, Non-Executive Director
Legal Council at the Norwegian Refugee Council, former Special Council of Wikborg & Rein and Group General Council of the Telenor group.

Ståle Bjørnstad, Non-Executive Director
Independent advisor for startup companies in financing and commercialization. Former CEO of Cxsense, and 20 years of experience from corporate finance.

The RASberry Project

Saga Robotics is also tightly connected with the RASberry project which is a collaborative research programme with NMBU (the Norwegian Life Science University) and the University of Lincoln, as partners. The aim is to develop robust and safe robots for autonomous operation in strawberry tunnels. The world's largest agri-robotics R&D team consists of around 30 PhD students and post-docs in addition to the Saga team, working on developing the Thorvald platform.

Interested in knowing more about Thorvald or just simply curious to why a world leading robot got the name Thorvald?
Pop up us an email and we'll let you in on the secret.

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