Harry is a prototype of what Small Robot claims will be the world’s first digital drilling robot for combinable crops, one of three smart robots called Tom, Dick and Harry robots that are being designed to feed, seed and weed arable crops autonomously – and whose light weight will cause less soil disturbance.

Harry is spider-shaped and 1.8 x 1.8m, which unfurls to ‘punch-plant’ seeds at a uniform depth, while recording where each seed was placed – data is fed back to the firm’s ‘Wilma’ artificial intelligence system to produce a per-plant crop map, and an early version of Wima is also on show at REAP 2018.