Eriksbo: an autonomous spraying robot

Context

Eriksbo Plantskola is a Swedish plant nursery with 15 km of plant borders to treat. When they switched from conventional to ecological, biologically-based herbicides, the spraying frequency jumped from once every two months to once every two weeks, and blanket-spraying at that cadence was no longer economically viable. At Exobotic we partnered with Farm-NG and ILVO to deliver an autonomous spot-spraying robot. In this project, I owned the software-engineering side, from architecture to field-ready product.

The Eriksbo spraying robot operating between plant rows — The Amiga robot freshly shipped at Exobotic, before integration of hardware and tools. Photo: exobotic.com.

My role

As the senior software engineer on the project, I was responsible for:

Software architecture of the whole robot, from low-level drivers to the field-operator UI.
Sensor and compute-hardware selection to fit the architecture and the payload constraints.
Real-time embedded OS setup so the stack runs safely and deterministically in the field.
Implementation, together with my colleagues at Exobotic.
Navigation strategies, based on RTK-GNSS teach-and-repeat, with seamless switch to visual navigation based on the tree rows detection.
Operator UI to set up routes, configure spraying quantities, start missions and review results, with a return-to-dock on low battery or empty tank.
Fleet monitoring system so Exobotic engineers can track robot health remotely and feed learnings back into the algorithms.

This project was a turning point for Exobotic: we moved from one-off demonstrators to a real product that has to work every day in production.

Technical aspects

Platform. A Farm-NG Amiga, 4-wheel-drive skid-steer, 200 kg payload.
Spot-spraying payload. Co-developed with ILVO: a camera head, NDVI-based weed detection and fast solenoid nozzles that pulse only when the pixel below is labelled weed.
Software stack. A modular suite based on Embedded Linux, Docker and ROS2.

Results

The robot was delivered in December 2025. As the nursery owner put it: “With ecological herbicides, the frequency of spraying has to go way up. With 15 km of plant borders to spray on a bi-weekly basis, we had to look into automating this task.”