The Thorvald platform emerged from the robotics group at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. By working closely with farmers, the main challenges of producers in Norway and internationally were identified, and we saw the need for introducing 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 and reliable mechanical design with intelligent autonomy and the world leading agricultural platform Thorvald was born.
Get to know us
Get to know us
Meet Thorvald
Thorvald is an autonomous modular robot that can be configured for most agricultural environments. This means the robotic platform can be re-configured to accommodate various conditions and perform different tasks on a farm. Thorvald can operate in open fields, tunnels, orchards and greenhouses and perform tasks such as light-treatment, picking fruits and vegetables, phenotyping, in-field transportation, cutting grass for forage, spraying and data collection/crop prediction.
Thorvald is autonomous so it operates entirely on its own. Thorvald uses advanced navigation and artificial intelligence to find and do tasks. The robot is small and lightweight and can solve several tasks on a farm better and cheaper than using tractor and manual labor.
Making farming greener while increasing yield and food production
By doing tasks that today require manual labour, such as picking strawberries, the robot solves an acute problem with access to labor that agriculture is struggling with, especially in the United States and the UK. A small and lightweight robot does not compact the soil and a robotized solution will reduce significantly environmental and operational problems due to soil compaction. Efficiency and profitability of the farm can be significantly increased by many of the tasks that a robot can do, such as mechanical weeding with machine vision. Large environmental problems can be solved with the use of a light treatment on the robot instead of pesticides, precision spraying and so on. In today's operation of farms there is limited collection and analysis of data. This improves dramatically with systematic data collection while the robot is running and working on other tasks. The analysis can be used both to optimize operations and to improve the logistics of the rest of the value chain.
Our mission
Saga Robotics is on a mission to transform farming into a service sector which is far more flexible, has lower risk, is more profitable, more environments, and which produces cheaper and better food.
Our vision
is to become a leading provider of robot/automated and knowledge based farming services.
What makes us different?
Many agricultural robot 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 fit most operating modes and can work with a variety of tools. We have a partner model that allows others to develop tools for the robot to get as many applications as possible as quickly as possible. This will allow us to reach a scale that makes the production of the robot very affordable. With this, we will be strong in competition both with existing solutions and with small specialized robots.
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 wonderful and 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, communications/brand and finance/business control 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 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 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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