The Robodog was one of the highlights of new innovation at Cereals 2026. Syngenta demonstrated the Robodog, which it says can be an agronomist’s best friend.

Syngenta currently use the dog in research, to do tedious work like plant counts. Rob Lind works in computer vision and AI at Syngenta and explained: “We can train the dog and deploy different computer vision models on the dog – things like weed detection. It can identify weeds down to the species or it could identify the crops, looking at crop vigour for example.

“We could look for insect pests and diseases as well on the crop,” Rob said.

The dogs are used commonly in glasshouse work and can predict yield very easily in the glasshouse, looking at the size, shape and quality.

It uses plant colours to assess disease and can very accurately quantify disease and give the exact percentage of septoria in a crop for example.

“They’re very good at detecting very small differences between plots and, when you’re doing research and development, those small differences are very important to detect,” Rob commented.

The dogs, which start at a cost of about £3,000 before they have been fitted with the high-tech gear, can carry a lot of equipment – about 8kg – on their backs, including cameras, sensors and data processing technology. They can be controlled with a remote or mapped using RTK according to Rob.

The technology can measure NDVI and help with nitrogen measurements. They are light on their feet, weighing about 15kg or 4kg/foot, so they don’t do much damage.

A big advantage is the AI processing unit on the dog, can run the models locally on the dog to avoid sending loads of data to the cloud, so the final data is available quickly.

Rob said unlike some of the drones which take about 24 hours to get the insights from, the dog sends the data straight to the cloud and processes it instantly, delivering the insights to the agronomist and, therefore, the recommendation to the farmer efficiently. There was a lot of interest from agronomists on the day.

Rob said: “I’ve been telling them I think it’s a good partnership between the agronomist and the dog. The dog is your best friend and you can send it out into the field.

“It can then run the models, look for whatever you’re looking for – it might be stand count or weed pressure.”

He said he can see a future where the dog comes back and tells the agronomist what it found and delivers the accurate data straight away. The Robodog is not currently available on the market.