By Tara Desmond
What if your sprayer never needed a driver and used 90% less chemical in the process? That's not a far-off vision. It's already rolling through cornfields across the Midwest.
On the latest episode of IL Corn TV, host Shane Gray welcomed Taylor Wetli, US Commercial Manager for Solinftec, to talk about the Solix Autonomous Sprayer — a solar-powered, AI-driven robot that's quietly rewriting the rules of weed management.
Solix moves across fields on a 40-foot boom equipped with eight cameras, each controlling three independent nozzles. Onboard, Solinftec's proprietary "Alice AI" runs in real time, identifying weeds among corn and soybean plants at every growth stage and in varying soil and tillage conditions. The result? The robot sprays everything that isn't the crop and only that. Depending on weed pressure, growers are seeing chemical reductions anywhere from the seventies to the high nineties, all from a unit with just a 56-gallon dual-tank system.
Because it's solar-powered and charges a lithium-ion battery as it works, Solix can run day and night. That expanded time window is one of the key advantages Wetli highlighted — the ability to get out early, spray often, and never let weeds like waterhemp get a competitive foothold in the field.
Click here to see more...