Steve Saunders: Robotics Plus co-founder on Yamaha acquiring the developers of AI-orchard vehicles

A Kiwi robotics company is at the heart of a new agriculture branch of Yamaha Motors. 

Yamaha's bought Robotics Plus, developers of AI-orchard vehicles designed to pick, prune, and spray fruits such as apples for an undisclosed fee. 

Co-founder Steve Saunders told Mike Hosking this new venture will help expand the company. 

“Exciting times ahead for us.” 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Robotic Plus is a key we company developing AI powered
autonomous vehicles. It's being brought out by Yamaha Motors. No less,
these are orchard specific machines that peck and spray and
prune and stuff any. Robotic Plus founder and CEO Steve
Saunders is with the Steve morning.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Ning Mike, how are you very well?

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Thank you? Was this the dream to start something small
and have somebody big come along and write you a
nice check?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
It's more purpose driven, Mike, about you know, solving solving
you know, a global issue and you know, we really
wanted to show that we could develop tech in New
Zealand that was got globally irrelevant and scalable, and so
you know, it is it is, It's part of a
vision and it grows on to be a bigger vision.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
What happens to you now? Do you stay with that
broader company or help them out or go on to
something completely different?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
No, I'm staying on for a while. I mean, you know,
yesterday was was was the announcement of that acquisition of
Robotics Plus, but it was also the announcement of Yamaha Agriculture.
And it's sort of like we're you know, the excitement
now is, you know, how do we take robotics pluses
at the heart of m agriculture strategy And now it's

(01:11):
on to grow even larger ag tech company via Yamaha Agriculture.
So some exciting times ahead for us.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
Where does the AI differentiate from the robotics Because I've
seen robotics when you're going up and down a row
or whatever, you can be robotic. What what does the
AI do to enhance that process?

Speaker 2 (01:31):
It's really it's it's really how it senses where it
is in the environment. So you know, you can do
robotics by training training the machine to drive up and
down the road. This this machine drives intelligently, so it
recognizes its its environment and can you know, work its
way through through all sorts of various situations. And it

(01:54):
also through the sensors we're collecting data, we're doing a
whole lot of a lot of other things. So real
time sensing.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
That log scrapy you've got, which is a similar tech
I'm assuming, but a completely different looking machine. Is is
it broader? You can take the basics of what this
thing does and turn it into any sort of machine
or not.

Speaker 2 (02:15):
Yeah, I think the you know, what we've really developed
as robotics plus is just a lot of really smart
technology around, you know, machine learning and vision systems and so,
you know, it's just how you can figure it for
different situations. So in the case of the log scaler,
we can you know, we scale, We scale trucks full

(02:37):
of logs or trains full of logs. Is that they
drive in. We scan everything, We download all the geosmetric
measurements and upload it into the into the into the
data system.

Speaker 1 (02:47):
How many people are because I can't I've seen your
machine before, I don't know that it is your machine.
Whether there are there other players in this market doing
this sort of thing or not.

Speaker 2 (02:56):
Yeah, there's there's there's always players in the market. There's
there's there's number of different players with different approaches. So
I guess you know, our approach has been around developing
a hybrid technology. So you know, we don't think battery
technology is quite there for long operational hours, so we
just use a diesel engine to generate power. The rest

(03:19):
of the machine is total electric, so one tank of
diesel can operate on an orchard for twenty four hours.
We use seventy percent less fuel, so you know, we're
really heading towards that, you know, full sustainability and decarbonization.
But the battery tech's got a little way to go
to be able to operate a machine of that size,
driving and implement for long hours.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, interesting times. Go well with that, Steve. Congratulations Steve Saunders.
I mean you've got to start small. Next thing, Yamaha
has Knocking at the Door Robotics plus CEO. Look it up.
Look at their Website's quite interesting what they do, and
I think this is the future of that sort of tech.
And you see it in buses and things with the
A to B something that can go A to B,
BA to B that's where your drivers take you. All

(04:03):
of that sort of thing. I think that's the future.
Getting it on the city roads and stuff I think
is going nowhere fast.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
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