A Danish self-driving, solar-powered robot can plant seeds and mechanically or chemically control weeds, all very precisely and fully automated.

By Amelia Genis, senior journalist at African Farming and Landbouweekblad

FarmDroid, the Danish company that manufactures the FarmDroid FD20, capable of both planting seeds and combating weeds, says this field robot helps to reduce labour costs and carbon emissions. It can operate on any terrain as long as the soil is not rocky, muddy or waterlogged. Its maximum working width is 3,5 metres, and it can seed and weed about 5 hectares per day – and it does so in a CO²-neutral and ecological way.

The FarmDroid FD20 was on display at the biennial Agritechnica 2025 trade fair in Hannover, Germany. Weighing 1 250 kg, it uses high-precision real-time kinematic GPS technology to record the exact position of every plant during seeding. It can then hoe between and within rows to remove weeds, and it has a micro-spraying system for spot or band spraying.

Pedersen says that on sunny days, the solar panels can generate enough energy to keep the robot running for 24 hours. There is also an option to buy 6 kW power banks to operate it for 6 to 12 hours on cloudy days.

Two Danish Brothers Came Up With a Plan

The FarmDroid had its origins on an organic farm in Jutland, Denmark.

Eddie Pedersen, the company’s head of sales and marketing, told African Farming at Agritechnica that the idea for the robot was conceived when Jens Vest Warming, who had just finished a degree in mechanical engineering, was helping to weed sugar beet fields by hand on his family’s farm one summer. It was hot and boring manual work. He thought that there had to be a smarter way to do it, so he started to develop the concept of an automated solution for weed control.

His brother Kristian, an electrician, got involved in the design. In the spring of 2018, they pitched the idea at the Odense Robotics StartUp Hub, where one of the investors was robotics expert Dr Esben Østergaard. And that led to them founding FarmDroid and building their first commercial robot. Today, a number of versions later, it is the best-selling autonomous seeding and weeding robot in the world.

Continuous Improvements

Pedersen says farmers don’t need to worry that the robot will run wild through a field if something goes wrong – for example, if it runs out of seed or if a seed gets stuck somewhere. It will stop immediately and send a notification to a phone app.

The FarmDroid FD20 can currently plant more than 100 different crops. The company has a laboratory where new seeds are tested, with input from farmers, to increase that number.

More than 500 FarmDroid FD20s are already in use by farmers in various European countries, and in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom.