Autonomous laser weeding · Anderson, South Carolina
The drone maps.
The robot fires.
Biogrow Robotics removes weeds with a near-infrared laser instead of herbicide. A survey drone finds and georeferences every weed before the machine enters the field — so the ground robot never has to decide anything in real time. It just drives to a coordinate and fires.
The problem
Chemistry is running out of road.
Weed control in row-crop agriculture still rests almost entirely on broad-spectrum herbicides. That model is failing from three directions at once.
Mechanical alternatives disturb the soil. Flame systems are energy-hungry. Existing robotic weeders still either spray a chemical or try to identify every weed in real time from a moving vehicle — which is where their speed and reliability go.
The architecture
Sensing and execution are separate machines.
This is the whole idea, and it is what our patent filings claim. Every other laser weeder tries to see and shoot from the same moving platform. We split the job in two — and the ground robot gets dramatically simpler, faster and more reliable as a result.
Swipe the diagram sideways to follow all three stages.
Survey
A LIDAR and multispectral drone flies the field and builds a 3D point cloud, separating crop from weed by height, reflectance and geometry. Every weed becomes a georeferenced record: position, canopy size, distance to the crop row.
Plan
The weed dataset is handed to the ground robot over an encrypted link before deployment. A path optimiser turns thousands of scattered coordinates into the shortest safe traverse of the row structure.
Execute
The robot drives the rows on RTK positioning, cross-referencing its own location against the list. When it reaches a coordinate, the laser head aims and fires — thermal ablation of the weed tissue, no contact with soil or crop.
Why this matters
A robot that already knows where every weed is doesn't need to be clever in the field.
Real-time detection is the hardest part of a weeding robot, and the part that breaks first — in dust, in low sun, under a partially occluded canopy. Moving that work into the air, ahead of time, removes it from the critical path.
Thermal ablation, not burning
A focused near-infrared pulse heats the weed's growing point until the cells fail. Nothing touches the soil. Nothing drifts onto the crop.
The robot
Built to be manufactured, not admired.
The platform exists to carry three things into a crop row and keep them working: the optics, the power and the positioning. Everything else was pushed off the vehicle on purpose.
Design visualisation. The first functional prototype is the objective of the current programme.
Platform
Chassis and drive
Payload
Optics and control
> 95 %
Weed detection accuracy from the aerial survey pass.
Target · from the patent specification
≥ 95 %
Task success rate in Q3 field trials.
Target · programme KPI
> 4 h
Continuous operation without failure at prototype stage.
Target · programme KPI
On the cost and savings figures you may have seen
Estimates of input-cost reduction per hectare, and of unit economics against machines costing over a million dollars, come from our internal financial model. They depend on crop, weed pressure and current herbicide programme, and they have not yet been validated by a third party in the field. We will publish measured numbers when the field programme produces them, and not before.
Where it works
Row structure is the requirement. Not the crop.
The architecture works wherever plants are grown in defined lanes and the weeds sit between them. That covers most of the acreage in the world, and almost all of the acreage where herbicide is the current answer.
Cereals & oilseeds
Soybean, wheat, barley and corn. Wide acreage, predictable row geometry, and the crops where herbicide resistance is doing the most economic damage. This is where the first field programme will run.
Vegetables & row crops
Lettuce, brassicas and similar bed-grown crops, where weeding is still largely done by hand and where a chemical residue is a commercial problem. Here the labour line is the cost being replaced.
Organic production
Certified operations where no herbicide is permitted and labour is the binding constraint. Thermal ablation touches neither the soil nor the seed bank, so it fits the rules by construction.
Company
An engineering company with one specific idea.
Not that lasers can kill weeds — that is established. Our claim is narrower and more useful: that a weeding robot becomes far cheaper, faster and more reliable the moment you stop asking it to recognise anything. That is a manufacturing problem, not a research problem.
The team
Engineering, agronomy and operations under one roof.
The laboratory
Where the control stack, the vision models and the laser optics are built and bench-tested.
Dr. Serji Armikhanian
CO-FOUNDER
Engineer and inventor with a background in complex systems, intellectual property and mechatronic product development. Leads the system architecture and the laser and optics work.
Gabriel Sakc
CO-FOUNDER
Military engineer with a track record in controlled-environment agriculture and mission-critical systems. Leads the agricultural application, the field programme and industrialisation.
Intellectual property
The separation is the patent.
Two provisional applications cover the system, both naming Dr. Serji Armikhanian and Gabriel Sakc as inventors. The independent claims turn on the same structural point: an aerial platform performs detection and georeferencing before deployment, and the ground platform executes weed elimination from that pre-acquired coordinate data without real-time recognition.
Programme status
Advanced design. Prototype next.
We would rather tell you this plainly than have you find it out later. Biogrow Robotics is a pre-prototype company. The architecture is designed, the bill of materials is complete, suppliers are selected, and the laser subsystem has been tested in the lab. The next twelve months build the working machine.
Architecture freeze
Mechanical and electrical design final. Long-lead components delivered. Closed-loop motor control on the test rig.
Risk removed: technical feasibility
Working prototype
Full assembly, sensors integrated, end-to-end control stack live, first autonomous task executed.
Risk removed: system integration
Field & reliability
Representative-environment testing, laser calibration, mechanical fatigue, pre-compliance safety and EMC.
Risk removed: operational reliability
Production readiness
DFM review, cost-down roadmap, technical and QA documentation, pilot-ready unit.
Risk removed: productisation
Contact
Tell us what you grow, and where.
Every message reaches the founders directly. We answer enquiries within two business days, including the ones that turn out not to be a fit.
Direct contact
Office
1428 Pearman Dairy Road
Anderson, South Carolina
United States
Response time
Within two business days
Investors
Investor enquiries
We are raising the round that funds the prototype programme. Select Investment in the form and we will send the executive summary, the use of funds and the quarterly KPI set. The full technical package, including the patent figure set and the bill of materials, follows under NDA.