The onion algorithm by Ecorobitx has been on the market as a fully functional product for 2 years. It’s being used by a number of farmers across Europe, mainly in Italy, France, and Switzerland of course.

This demonstration was organised on the Egger & Sons estate in Chavornay (Switzerland). We used ARA to spray a selective herbicide targeting weeds such as broadleaf and grassy weeds. Up to 7.5 km/h, weeds are successfully detected by the camera and sprayed by the machine.

Video of the test run

Efficient detection system

The visual recognition system detects weeds, whatever their development stage. In the video, you can see that weeds are identified even at a very early stage: just after germination, when they’re still at the seedling stage, they're recognised by the typical shape of the cotyledons and the two first leaves.

What you can also see in this video is that no weed is ignored. Even more, no onion bulb is wrongly identified as a weed.

Our algorithm also detects weeds when they are located close to or even on the onion plant. The mix of shapes and colours doesn't trump our visual recognition system.

Weed control in an onion field – front view of ARA

Ultra-high precision spraying

Being able to spray up to an accuracy of 6 x 6 cm, ARA can treat even the weeds that are very close to the onion bulbs without affecting them.

Since ARA only sprays what needs to be sprayed and nothing else, it uses a lot less plant protection product. On onion crops, the decrease in product usage is around 70% to 80%.

«With ARA, even a non-selective plant protection product becomes selective, because it’s sprayed in an ultra-targeted way, only where it needs to be.»
Loïc Wüthrich, technical sales engineer at Ecorobotix

Weed control in an onion field - detail — Only the weeds are targeted, the onion bulbs are spared.

For all seasons and soils

The onion algorithm is one of the most comprehensive and versatile of the Ecorobotix product range. The first reason is that there are spring and summer onion varieties and they will fight different weeds depending on the season. So we had to train the visual recognition system to identify all these various weeds, at every development stage.

Also, onion can be grown on many different kinds of soils. In the Orbe plain in Switzerland, onion is grown in very dark and peaty soils. In Loiret (France) however, our partner Groupe Méthivier has run a number of tests on lighter-coloured, mineral soils. In the Rhine plains, some farms have very diverse terrain, where you can switch from black soil in some areas to lighter tones a few yards away. So we had to train our algorithm to work on various soils so it can be efficient on all farms.

Weed control in an onion field – black soil — In Chavornay (Switzerland), the soil is peaty and dark, almost black.

Weed control in an onion field – light-coloured soil — In a test in Germany, we had to deal with sandy, lighter-coloured soil

The demanding tests we run with our team have shown that our detection models are robust. They work fine, whatever the season or the colour of the soil.