In the town of Cognac in Western France, there is a new worker tending to the Grand Champagne and Petite Champagne crus vineyards. It’s a robot called Ted.
An agricultural robot by Naïo Technologies, Ted has been working on the French vineyards alongside human employees for Rémy Martin. While their human employees prune vines, Ted’s job is to deweed the vineyards and share real-time data with the teams of Naïo Technologies and Rémy Martin. This interesting collaboration has resulted in better-quality grape yields, water conservation and elimination of chemical weed killer usage.
Not only this, Ted has been designed to track GPS data to have accessibility across the vineyards, map plots with the help of a drone, and detect wine crops via its camera and sensors to tend crops efficiently. Its deployment in the vineyards has led to swift responses by the teams of Rémy Martin to unpredictable weather crisis like hail and frost, which has helped in avoiding loss of produce.
Ted was developed by two robotic engineers, Gaëtan Séverac and Aymeric Barthes, at Naïo Technologies to solve modern agricultural problems, especially the ones that deal with sustainability and laboured tasks. Pitched to Rémy Martin by the robotics company, the cognac label is the first to use Ted in its vineyards. For now, this efficient robot is not available in the market for sale.
I hope to see robots like Ted maintaining Indian vineyards in the coming years. It will definitely elevate the overall wine experience in the domestic market.
