Seeding Robot: From Hand Sowing to FarmDroid and ABB

A seeding robot does the first job of the growing season: putting each seed in the ground at the right depth and spacing. For most of history that meant a person walking the field and throwing seed by hand, and later a horse or tractor pulling a seed drill. This post follows sowing from hand broadcasting and Jethro Tull's drill to GPS planters, then to the small solar robots now seeding fields, such as Denmark's FarmDroid. It also covers the ABB YuMi that plants seeds in the Peruvian Amazon, and the costs and business risks that still hold field robots back.

ABB's YuMi cobot planting seeds in soil bags during the Junglekeepers pilot in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo: ABB

From hand broadcasting to Jethro Tull's drill and GPS planters

Before seed drills, most seed was sown by broadcasting. The field was ploughed into furrows and the farmer threw the seed over it by hand, an imprecise and wasteful method. Seeds that landed outside the furrows lay too shallow, and many stayed on the surface, where birds ate them, the wind carried them off or frost killed them after they sprouted too early. Sowing too thickly hurt as well, because crowded plants compete for water and minerals and yield less. Hand sowing lasted a long time. Even a century after Jethro Tull, broadcasting grain by hand was still common, and a 1964 photo in Finland's heritage collection shows a man still sowing that way.

A man sowing seed by hand in 1964. Photo: Erkki Voutilainen / Finnish Heritage Agency via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Machines for sowing in rows are old. The Babylonians used primitive seed drills around 1400 BCE, and the Chinese built multi-tube iron seed drills in the 2nd century BCE. In Europe, the Venetian Senate granted a patent for Camillo Torello's seed drill in 1566, and Jethro Tull refined the machine in England in 1701. A drill opens a furrow to a set depth, drops the seed and covers it, and seed sown this way can yield up to eight times as much per seed planted as broadcast seed. Early drills were expensive, fragile and unreliable, though, and they only spread in Europe in the mid to late 19th century, once machine tools and metal stamping made precise parts possible at scale.

A horse-drawn Smyth seed drill from 1920 at the Hillside Norfolk Shire Horse Centre in West Runton. Photo: Kolforn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Early drills were small enough for one horse, and many stayed in use into the 1930s. Steam and then gasoline tractors brought bigger drills that could seed far larger areas in a day. Modern drills blow the seed through plastic tubes from a central hopper, which lets them reach 12 metres wide, and the biggest planter, John Deere's DB120, sows 48 rows of maize or beans at once. Satellites brought the next step. GPS auto-steer replaced the marker arms that once showed the driver where to go, computer-controlled planters such as Case IH's AFS place seed to within 2 cm, and they stop dropping seed over ground already sown when the tractor overlaps its own path.

A John Deere MaxEmerge XP corn planter behind a Case IH Magnum tractor with the AFS precision farming system at World Ag Expo 2011. Photo: Kowloonese / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Small solar robots that seed, and an ABB cobot in the Amazon

One of the first field robot successes in Europe, according to La France Agricole, began on a sugar beet field in Denmark. Jens Vest Warming, a mechanical engineer who was hand weeding beets on his family's organic farm, started developing the FarmDroid and was later joined by his brother Kristian, an electrician. Their FD20 is a 1,250 kg solar-powered robot that sows up to 12 rows and records where every seed goes with RTK GPS accurate to 8 mm, so it can later hoe between the plants, even before they emerge. It travels at 950 metres an hour and covers up to 6 hectares a day. FarmDroid says more than 500 FD20s now work in 26 countries, and one in France sowed 77.7 hectares this season.

An Agrointelli Robotti autonomous field robot on the Kubota stand at the Öko-Feldtage 2025. Photo: MarcelX42 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

FarmDroid is now scaling up. On 21 October 2026 La France Agricole described the FD60, which works up to 6.75 m wide with up to 20 rows, handles seeds from 0.8 to 14 mm and is rated for 60 hectares a season, three times the FD20. Eight solar panels with 3.7 kW feed a 23.5 kWh battery, backed by a 3 kW petrol generator for long or cloudy days. Orders are open, the first machines reach fields from January 2027, and the official launch is at Agromek in Denmark at the end of November. In September 2026 a team at Kafrelsheikh University in Egypt also reported a solar-powered seeding robot that hit its target seed spacing with 98.08 to 98.80 percent accuracy.

A New Holland TM165 tractor pulling a Väderstad seed drill at Allesley, October 2010. Photo: Amanda Slater / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

ABB makes no field seeding robots. Its YuMi cobot plants seeds in a very different place. In a pilot announced in June 2023, ABB and the non-profit Junglekeepers installed a YuMi in a jungle lab in a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon. It digs a hole in the soil, drops in a seed, compacts the soil on top and marks it with a colour-coded tag, work that had been done entirely by hand. ABB says this lets Junglekeepers replant an area the size of two soccer fields every day. Engineers in Västerås, Sweden, 12,000 km away, simulate, refine and deploy its programs through RobotStudio Cloud, and after installation the robot works on its own.

A Junglekeepers ranger handles a crate of seed bags beside the YuMi at the jungle base station. Photo: ABB

Where seeding robots go next, on farms, in sheds and at home

Agrointelli, the Danish maker of the Robotti, shows the business risk. Its robot is an autonomous implement carrier that can seed, weed, spray and slash with standard implements, and the company had delivered more than 65 of them, which worked over 10,000 hours in 20 countries, before it filed for bankruptcy in February 2026. In September Future Farming reported that the UK company Autonomous Agri Solutions had bought the hardware, parts and production materials to keep supporting the machine, while the patents and software were sold separately. Its verdict was that the product worked but the business did not scale fast enough to sustain it.

A Robotti fitted with a Garford Robocrop hoe at Agritechnica 2025. Photo: MarcelX42 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Indoors, ABB's robots fit more easily. The Amazon YuMi already sows seed bags on a bench, and a GoFa cobot, which ABB says can share a workspace with people without fencing and lists for palletizing and machine tending, could stack trays or sacks of seed next to staff. An IRB 360 FlexPicker, which ABB calls the fastest industrial delta robot in the world and builds for payloads from 1 to 8 kg, could pack seed packets at speed. We found no ABB project of that kind, so both remain possibilities. Cells like these are usually built and tested first in RobotStudio, and the lab side of seed work is covered in our post on seed lab automation.

The YuMi tending seed bags at the Junglekeepers base station. Photo: ABB

Cost and scale are still open questions. FarmDroid suggests one FD20 for fields of about 20 hectares per crop per season, so bigger farms need a fleet or the FD60. Light weight helps when the ground is wet: one FD20 in Germany logged 44 hours in wet conditions this season because it does not sink the way heavy machinery does. If anything goes wrong, the robot stops and notifies the farmer. At home, the nearest thing is FarmBot, an open source Cartesian robot that Rory Aronson started in 2011. Its Genesis kit went on preorder in July 2016 and can sow, weed and water a garden bed, controlled from a web browser.

A single-person seed drill on display in the Clocking In exhibition at Bedford Museum. Photo: Simon Speed / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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