Muddy Machines Interview with Florian Richter

Philip English

Welcome to the Robot Philosophy Podcast, where we keep you up to date on the latest news, reviews and anything new in the robot world. Right. Hi, guys. It’s Philip English. RoboPhil from Robot Philosophy podcast. We’re here today with Florian from Muddy Machines just to learn a little bit more about Muddy Machines and what their team is up to. I probably kick off straight away. Could you give us just a general intro flooring, obviously, what Muddy Machines is about?

Florian Richter

Yeah, of course, Phil, thanks for having me on. Pleasure to be here. I’ve seen lots of your videos so far. Very interesting founders on there. Yeah. So, Muddy Machines is an act tech? Robotics company. We build robots that are about like 180 x 180 big, so quite sizable machines. Here’s a cat picture of what Sprout looks like. And these robots. Why do we do what we do? There is a massive labor shortage in farming. I mean, all robotics companies, I guess, tackle labor shortages in one way or another, but in farming, we’re really coming to a place where growers are stopping the production of certain crops because they are too labor intensive. You have something like 50, 60% of the production cost being labor. If you can’t get your seasonal labor force in because of Brexit, because of COVID and general, the price that you can pay per hour isn’t exactly going up. With supermarket price pressures exerted on growers, you just end up with what grows from telling us a 30% to 50% shortage of labor force. Right. And then you’re sitting on your crop nets that you’re rotting away in the field. It’s actually a great weather this year for some growers.

Florian Richter

They get very high yields. Water is a bit of an issue, too, now as it continues. But if you can’t harvest your crop, you’re making an outright loss instantly. And so, we think that this is something that hasn’t sufficiently addressed yet with robotics technology. Yes, there are plenty of machinery out there that do combine harvesting, where the crop has a very uniform growing pattern and you can pull the trigger on a certain day and say, now get me all my bali, get me all my wheat. You have these big combined harvesters going through the field, but with vegetables, it’s fruit berries. You need to really go in and say, okay, so is this one ripe? Now pick it, put it in my basket, and then leave the rest to ripen for another couple of days. And that’s something that hasn’t been done by any of these traditional OEMs and agriculture so far. And that’s where Muddy Machines comes in with Sprout.

Philip English

Right. Fantastic. That’s a great intro, Florence. Thanks for that. What’s your background? I understand that the family comes from a farming sort of background, and then at the same time, you’ve got a co-founder, Chris. I was interested in his sort of background as well.

Florian Richter

Yeah. So, we have two people, Chris and me. Chris is the CTO. He’s the one with the robotics background. He has spent quite a long time at Dyson. He spent some time at delivery building automated kitchens. He’s done some work in field search and rescue robots. So, he really straddles. I call him like a full stack robotics engineer, right? He can do everything. He has built our first prototype, Sprout MK One, by himself, 100% last year. And now we finally have a big enough team to bring in specialists, mechanics, engineer, specialist, computer vision, et cetera, to really leverage his skills wider. And yeah, I take care of everything on the business side. I’m an economics business student by training. I’ve been in many different startups over the last 10-15 years, really across the spectrum of ecommerce software as a service fintech. And yeah, you mentioned my family farming background, and we credit to my in-law family. They are the ones that got into farming probably about a decade ago in Portugal. Actually, Portugal wasn’t doing so well for a while, as you remember, and there was a lot of land or derelict farms available where the business has been completely mismanaged, was in disarray.

Florian Richter

And they have taken on over 1500 hectares in the Alentejo region, mostly cattle, so open field grazing, so very sustainable if you do it right, and olive orchard. And that really got me thinking into what is the kind of business stuff that I know, and then got his insight into farming and then realized the massive potential for building something that is long term sustainable, but at the same time has very long planning horizons. The first thing we have to do is ensure the water supply or the land is healthy enough again to retain water. You have a big drought issue in Portugal, and then you make some investments that sometimes take 10 to 15 years to pay back. And now we’re slowly in a place where the thing is commercially viable again and we can reinvest in it. And then when I had a point in my life, okay, what’s my next start up? I said, okay, I think I really want to be in the agricultural world and adding some value there with the skills that I have. But building an app or something, that would be something that I could probably do quickly by myself.

Florian Richter

I think this has been attempted already to mix success. So, it was pretty clear to me that if you want to bring technology into agriculture, if you want to enable farmers, at that time, I didn’t even know about the labor issues in vegetable growing with that. Okay, so if you want to do something in the space, you need to be a really deep tech person that does something transformational. And then when I spoke to Chris and understood what the state of the art of robotics is, then we had a shared conviction of, okay, so we want to do something in agriculture. We want to do something that really moves the needle for people working in that industry. What could that be? And then with his background of robotics, when you speak to growers, what’s your problem? And you start hearing labor shortages, labor shortages, then you’re like, okay, so this is obviously something that we could take a look at. And then in the middle of corporate, we did a field visit with a very large asparagus grower here in the UK. We got I think we got a special permit to drive out in May 2020 with a GoPro camera and a speedy camera and just started to take some pictures of crop in the field to see can we actually see this?

Florian Richter

Can we, with a reasonable effort record, good enough image data, and that was successful. I mean, that’s far from perfect. Okay, cool. So, this works. Now can we mock up something that grabs? Can we build some kind of end effective solution and then we iterate it through in a year later, we had something that was a very decent proof of concept, looks a lot different from what the picture I’ve just shown you was very bolted together with aluminum intrusions and all that. But it was enough to see, yes, this could potentially work. Now you just need to make it faster, more robust, and that’s when it gets really hard, as any person knows who’s trying to build a robot with commercial specifications. But although in last year we had something that proved the concept, we did a lot of work on the machine that we put into the field this year, but that still, again, needs that. The last 5% are the hardest to get it to the right pick speed, the right operation and time, the robustness against the elements and all that. That’s kind of our story, our backgrounds, where we’ve come from.

Florian Richter

We met an entrepreneur first, which is a great program to get people like me to meet people like Chris.

Philip English

Right. And is that based in London?

Florian Richter

The original program is based in London. I think they have cohorts in Berlin and a couple of other major cities as well now. And it’s great. I can highly recommend it if you are I mean, from my point of view, if you have a business background, you’re kind of always ready to go to start a business. But there are many technical people that get very tempted by high paying jobs in bigger corporates. And I know engineers have also typically a higher requirement for job security, continuity, et cetera. And you get addicted to that. Right? And so Entrepreneur First, they’re trying to rescue people from the corporate ladder and get them into a safe space where it’s like, okay, here’s a stipend, here’s a program. We’ll teach you how to start up. And here’s someone who could be your co-founder as a CEO or COO, and you can do this together.

Philip English

Right? Cool. Now that’s a great overview. Thanks, Lauren. I know you discussed about some of the problems. So, if you’re going to hang it down to sort of three key issues that we’ve seen in the farming industry, can you go through that with us?

Florian Richter

Yeah. So, again, the biggest one for us was the obvious labor shortage and the imminent losses of revenue that come with it. But if you think about, what does it mean if a UK grower stops the production of a certain type of vegetable? Right? Supermarkets are still going to offer this, still going to want to provide this to the consumer. And then that means that we’re going to increase the number of vegetables that we import. Some of them need to stay fresh and you have to air freight them in. So, when you’re buying, for example, asparagus from Peru, you need to air freight these in because they go off very, very quickly, and then you have a five times higher carbon footprint on the kilo of produce versus domestic. And so, this is something that I believe, with a conscious mind, you mustn’t let happen, that we become increasingly dependent on carbon intensive food mile, heavy imports, watching your domestic production industry die. And then in the long run, we are faced with massive global population increases. So I wonder if it is going to be possible at infinity to be reliant on food imports. Every single hectare that we can sustainably farm here, we should retain that, because at some stage and export a country like Peru or even Spain right, who have massive water shortages and will not be able to export at that volume forever. What we see with gas today, we might see with fresh produce in a couple of years. So I think it’s absolutely vital to build something that allows the domestic or allows the continuation of domestic production in the UK, but also in many other countries. Like the third problem that you have in in farming is. Yes, technology is getting built, but is it actually making your process better? Traditionally, the answer has been, okay. It’s expensive to have a person on a tractor to go up and down the field doing harvesting. Let’s build a bigger tractor. Let’s build a bigger combine. And this causes a lot of soil compaction, which reduces the amount of water that a soil can contain, can retain, so you have bigger desertification and runoff. Compaction also massively reduces the amount of biomass that is in the soil. So you need to combat that with additional use of expensive and chemical fertilizer, reducing your profits again. And so what’s the upshot of this? So you need to be very careful not to build a solution that okay, it might do automated picking, but it’s so heavy that it compacts the soil even more than it is already getting done these days. And so this is from our design principles, right? We need to have something that can compete or at least be cost competitive with labor. And if I offer growers a robot that costs ten times as much per kilo of produce harvested, well, then, you know, I haven’t really improved the situation. If I give them something that is very bulky, very heavy, aside from all these risks of single point of failure, massive complex machines, the soil compaction alone is going to reduce their yields or increase costs on other ends. And so these are kind of the framework that we’re thinking within.

Philip English

 Right, perfect. Yes. No, that’s perfect. That’s gone over to the authority and problem and bearing solution then. Okay. No. So you’ve got a nice clear sort of the problems and the solutions for you. I mean, I suppose from money machines point of view, I mean, what’s the sort of dream then? What’s the bigger picture? What’s the sort of next steps for you guys on your journey to the farming, which I totally agree with you. I mean, think robotics in the farming is the best area to be really, in terms of the actual uses.  As soon as we have more and more technology going into that field, then we’ve really got really going to have a lot of advantages from it. So, yeah, I’m keen to see what’s your plans and sort of next steps and road plans. My money machine.

Florian Richter

Yeah, I think we had a couple of tough years funding or funding finances for this project. If you’re thinking about a traditional software as a service funding story, right, you need very little money in the beginning to throw together some software and then at the end you’re serious AB, et cetera. You raise a lot of money to push the product into the market. With robotics, I think it’s the reverse, right? You have a lot of costs in the beginning to get to a prototype, to get to a commercial viable version. You spend a lot of time just building hardware. A lot of you spend a lot of money doing that. But then, as you just said, once you have a robot that works, there is no doubt that the market is going to line out the door asking for this robot to be available to them. We struggled a bit with this kind of getting money now and making investors understand you will not be paying at infinity once we have the product market fit of the robot. And so for us going forward, the biggest milestone is to actually build a small number of sprouts to really prove that this small ish machine form factor. When applied to a swarm or to a herd of robots. This can actually operate at scale and deliver the kind of harvest capacity that the farmers require. And then we need to again find. Investors that then finance the the first production run at scale, where we where we need to build 100 or even 200 robots. Right. We have one grower here in the UK. They said as soon as you have 100 robots, I want them all. I probably need two or 300, but the sooner you can get me a sizable number, the better. And this is a commercially this is a dream come true, right. You have a very large, capable and keen customer. You just and this is, I think, for the next six to twelve months is our day to day challenge. You just have to build a robust and capable machine that can be relied on in this mission critical harvest environment.

Philip English

Yeah. And then does it work with a fleet system? So if a customer did buy like multiple units, is there a fleet system? Obviously it may not be there yet, but is that something you guys want to develop or already have flight developed?

Florian Richter

Yeah, absolutely. The robots  we are working on a fleet management or herd management solution where you assign a certain number of robots to a certain field and they will coordinate based on not every row is as it’s going to take the same amount of time as the next row. There might be some more crop density in one row as opposed to the other row. And so the dumb thing would be to just finish one row and stop and not do anything until the others have finished. In this way we believe we can get some efficiencies of dividing conquer work in the field. You mentioned buying a robot. I think this is an important point to call out. We see this as a robotics, as a service or hardware? As a service business, because. I think I mentioned this. Our first crop is green Asparagus. But we don’t want to stop there, right? We want to enable the harvest capacity for a variety of different labor-intensive crops. We have some innovative UK funded research projects in Crojettes. We tend to stem broccoli as well. If you look at the farming calendar, asparagus is only like three months of the year. One of the first crops, crops in the UK that comes into harvest, and then this ends in June, and then from June to November, you have other crops, like, for example, projects that are sequentially being harvested for the rest of the year in different rotations. And so we see Sprout, the robot as a platform to be able to mount or be tooled with different types of harvest solutions that can be swapped out. When you’re done with the Asparagus season, you swap the tool and you send it into a quizte field and you busy the rest of the year there. But this only works if you actually keep owning the robot as muddy machines and the grower pays you a usage-based fee quite similar to how they run with people, right? They don’t own the workers, they pay them an hourly rate and that bit of peace rate, et cetera. And then also the workers move on, right? When the Asparagus harvest is done, these workers go into blueberries, rhubarb, whatever is the next crop that that farmer grows. And I think this lends itself very nicely to a robotics business where you always struggle with expenditure machine, limited use case. How can you make the application big enough for this solution not to be prohibitively expensive?

Philip English

 Yeah, no, that’s right. And I must admit I have seen the robots as a service like model has obviously been around for a while, but I have seen a lot more companies and just the industry in general try to push towards it for those reasons. Really. I mean, one of them being that the technical side, obviously, if they buy a robot, then you need to have the technical expertise inhouse to make sure that it’s actually managed wherever as a service, obviously that comes with the package and you have a whole team of people behind you. They’re actually servicing machines so you can focus on your business and getting the results that you want instead of doing a robot business.

Florian Richter

It is somewhat common already with pack house appliances. If you have like a big grating belt or like a washing solution for your vegetables, yes, the growers buy these, but there’s a very large annual service fee involved in that. The OAM is not able to take the pack street out of the warehouse and put it somewhere else. Right, but the robot, you actually can do that. So it makes more sense to not actually sell the robots but say, okay, we are just as interested as you are in this thing working for every single minute where there’s something in harvest, the small form factor makes it actually possible for us to have units spare in stock to swap out while we are fixing something. If you combine harvest that breaks in harvest season, you’re out for a day or two. You might lose hectares and hectares of production. And so far the farmers are quite receptive to this concept. To understand that we only earn if you earn. And we’re not going to ask you to do any kind of major maintenance on these robots. If you have a guy that knows how to get a tractor back up and running, that guy will be more than capable to what are the basic maintenance things? Like maybe swap a wheel or do some basic stuff if the actual control unit breaks. Right, of course, we could potentially even just ship the part or have a part spare and that you can swap out quite quickly with a couple of bolts. I think a tractor is much more complex than an EV robot.

Philip English

Right, okay. And then how long does it take to get the robot working then? Is it like so if I just if I had the field, I wanted to go in there and get it working? Within the field, is there certain sort of measurements that you have to take or is it like you get the robot does the measurements, how long does it take to get it going?

Florian Richter

 This is something we need to really figure out as we go into fields that we’re not familiar with in principle, with something like Asparagus. The nice thing is that for seven years you have the same roads six or seven years, so you have the same plants in the ground. So even if worst case, on the first day, all you do is drive the robot up and down, down all the rows so that it records the way points. You can use that map for as long as these Asparagus crowns stay in the ground. We don’t change farm very often with these robots. Right. So we can afford to have relatively high setup times. Of course, we want to be able to just get a ask the farmer. OK, you surely have RTK GPS maps of your fields when you did your seeding or your cultivation. Let’s just integrate those. We can set boundaries on things like Google Maps or other GPS maps that they may have to understand. Okay. What area does the robot absolutely not. Is the robot not allowed to leave? From a security point of view, I think in the initial setup of a field, within one day you are more than capable of then operating. What we are very mindful of is before we start working with the new grower is to first actually see what is the infrastructure that is in place. Is there a shed where we could have overnight storage and charging power? How far is this shed away from the next field and in all the fields? So can the machine drive itself there? Do we have to think of another storage solution further away or load them up on a trailer in the morning? Right. Those are the interesting operational bits. In the US. You have 50 miles sometimes before you hit the hit the next kind of power source. Those are challenges that we need to figure out. I mean, is there solar? Is there some other power source that we can use? Should we go in and swap out the batteries? Lots of open, interesting questions that you can only solve when you work very, very closely with the growers,

Philip English

With the actual growers. Yeah. Okay, now that makes sense. Is there a solar powered one? Is that possible to take enough power from the sun, or is it you will need some form of additional battery?

Florian Richter

I mean, solar is making massive increases in efficiency, etc, every year. So I think there’s going to be a day where you can power a harvest robot on solar. I don’t think this is currently possible. I know that there are some weeding robots that do a lot less complex mechanical bits than we do, and they also don’t have to drag the weight of the crop around. So I think this is something that can be supplemental as a power source. The other thing with robots in the field is you need to do all your calculations and computing on the edge. You cannot rely on a steady 5G internet connection. You can do this in the greenhouse. So you’ll see, in the greenhouse, you’ll see much lighter robots because you have WiFi even. Right. And in the field, you need to do everything on the machine, and that also takes a lot of power.

Philip English

Right. Perfect. Okay. Yeah. I did have a few extra things. Obviously, we discussed about robots as a service for farming, and that’s the root for money machines, precision harvesting. So I’m guessing, from what I understand, obviously this is where the machine can actually check the sprout or the vegetable that it’s looking at to see if it’s right before actually taking it out of the ground. So that’s been built into the machine, and I guess it’s some sort of vision system to have a look at it and see from there.

Florian Richter

We have three core technology aspects, right? So one, we have what we call sprout, the autonomous electrically powered robot platform. How does that get across terrain, how much battery power is on there, how resistant is this to weather, et cetera? The next one is, like you said, the vision system. So on the machine cameras of different specifications that look at the crop, I mean, we also look what’s around the robot, so we don’t injure anyone. But specifically looking at the crop and learning, okay, this is crop, this isn’t crop. And if it is crop, is it within specification that the pack house is going to want it? So essentially how you also train and this can take weeks for people, even how you train an algorithm that understands, okay, so the asparagus beer I’m looking for is at least 16 CM long. It shouldn’t be too bendy, it shouldn’t have any flowering. And if I then want to take that, then you come into the third area of how do I actually get it out of the field? How do I grip it, how do I cut it off? Do I twist it off? Do I chop it, all of these things without damaging not yet ripe crop around it? You wouldn’t cut off an apple tree just to get one apple. With the field vegetables. One spear is good to go, the other one is too small. So how do you get to the bottom of this spear without having the other one being nicked? Because when you nick it, it goes in a crooked way. So these three areas you need to solve. At the same time, I mean, one of them you can I think we have a very, very good drivetrain right now. And now we can fully focus on the efficiency and accuracy of the end effector. Asparagus was very good in the sense that it doesn’t have a foliage coverage. So that the computer vision. I think we are in the high ninetys now in terms of accuracy, that’s really, really good. There are the crops that have leaves things that move as you get into it that make the vision angle a lot more challenging. But I think you probably will never be 100% done with the most performant end effector. That is super fast, never breaks, has always got a sharp blade or sharp scissor on it.

Philip English

That’s a good overview. I suppose with the development of more cameras we’ve seen from the camera side, the vision systems are getting better and better and better. So I guess as that comes along, I suppose you got a lot more end effectors. Even you got the world of Haptics as well. But that probably doesn’t quite make this world, but even just the sensibility, the actual touch of the senses,

Florian Richter

It does. Right. I think as everything in the robotics world, right, what we what we’re using now would have been unaffordable five years ago and was probably only used in the defense or nuclear industry ten years ago. Right. And what these guys are using today to clean our nuclear power plant, of course, that would work in the field if you have a quarter million pounds to spend on it. Right. With a robot, you’re talking more like, okay, so maybe I can’t even spend 100 grand on one robot, or even maybe I should be spending ten. And the really exciting thing is for people coming into this space or out of university is that this is a wave that is currently rolling, that we can serve. And this wave being powered by not only nuclear and defense, but actually from the entire EV automotive industry. We are suffering from parts being unavailable because of China being still in lockdown. I know that Tesla and VW and who have you are also really concerned about this. So they will unlock it and we will get our batteries within under 40 week lead time again. It’s staggering to see the opportunities and the potential coming into this new as a company or as a person. There aren’t too many people around that are old gray men that have done this for 30, 40 years. If you’re a smart graduate today. Do consider Act Robotics companies

Philip English

Coming into well, this is it. I mean, as you’re saying, you have the aging workforce. A lot of the baby boomer generation is retiring, and when they retire, they retire their skills as well. And this is why I think a lot of the robot companies are trying to make it easier for graduates to come into the business with more digital tools for them to learn to actually understand those skills. The last three questions I did have was obviously just going through the details of my machine. You guys will be able to yield predictions, and then we’ll see that’s intelligence driven by the AI piece and the camera pieces, you were saying? And then I was wondering if you had any quick stats around it, just to say his is sort of like an example stat wise

Florian Richter

Example stats. One interesting stat is that if you do harvesting in Asparagus more accurately than humans, for example, cutting the Asparagus is exactly at ground level and not leaving a stubble. This will get you up to 20% more yield, because the crown will produce more spears if you stop the photosynthesis. And B, you have more produce on your scale, which is what you get paid for by the supermarket. And the produce itself stays fresher if you have a little bit more stem on it. In terms of yield forecasting, we will have to see what stats we generate there for growers. Right. The nice thing is that yield prediction could probably in itself be a business, but it’s just too expensive to deploy a robot to do just that, right? So our unfair advantage almost is we are building a business that is very viable and profitable because of the harvesting. But the data we are generating is a byproduct. If we go through the field thinking, okay, can I harvest this? Can I harvest that? We have created a fully real time yield map of the field already just in that pass, and we’re doing it on the next day and the day after as we go back and harvest more. You can actually play that back to the grower and say, here’s a real time yield map of your field. And they can then make much more accurate decisions in terms of when to harvest, how much to harvest, harvest, what length to harvest, and also then knowing their fields much, much better. Because what you do post harvest in Asparagus, for example, you let it all grow into fern to recharge the roots, and then you fly a drone over and see where the fern growth is very weak. And that is then an area where you should do some intervention, control making the reducing the soil compaction. But this fern takes a couple of weeks to grow. So between stopping to harvest and knowing where are the actual weak spots in your field, several weeks will pass. If you have a real time yield map from our robots, the minute you stop harvesting, you know, okay, this corner of the field over there, these 2030 sqm have an issue here. Should I take it out of production? Can I do something? And you only have between June and February to do anything to your field. If we’re giving them an extra two months to be able to do something, that’s a massive advantage. One thing that we work with the largest UK asparagus grower, right? Cobberry farms. They grow 50% of the UK’s asparagus. They have a house where they pack 80% of the UK’s produce. And they are telling me that if they don’t see a, like light at the end of the tunnel of the labor issue, they will stop production of Asparagus within five years. So this is not a generation away. This is very imminent. We know that unharvested vegetables have cost the industry at least £150,000,000 in lost revenues. And the shocking thing here is they have invested in the crop, right? When you count harvested, all the money you’ve put into it is already lost in terms of harvest workers. To give you an idea, you need about 80,000 people, seasonal workers in the UK per year. Pick for Britain, if you recall, that campaign resulted in about 2% of that being filled. And we know, we know stories like I had 3000 people apply after months of vetting. I had 200 people that were actually suitable. And after a week, I had one person left. It’s very, very hard work there in the field. The absurd thing is that. You know, we’ve left we left the EU. We have about we issue now 30,000 or so visas to migrant workers. That 80. You need 80,000, you issue 30,000 visas. This obviously doesn’t quite work. There aren’t that many people with previous leave to remain or to come back to fill that gap. Last year, we had half of the workers that came in instead of the Europeans coming in were from Ukraine. So, sadly, this year, the Ukrainians are no longer able to come. And it really feels like if you’re a grower, that someone’s sitting on your chest and just punching you with one blow after the other. Because what they have now also done is these 40,000, 30,000 visa visas that have been offered, instead of increasing this number, what the government have done is they’ve actually opened this pool up to other professions like the abattoirs and other foodrelated industries. Instead of increasing the visa pool, they’ve just opened the visa pool up to more industries being able to take from it. Roy reducing visas that a grower of vegetables can actually take, even ornamental horticulture is in there now as well, right? And this is staggering. If you ask a grower, what else made you angry this year? They tried to push in a regulation that meant that you have to yes, you can get foreign workers, but you have to pay and more than domestic workers. Would have increased the hourly rates that growers have to pay, I believe, ten to 20% in one go. And this came in after they had already negotiated all the terms for the year with the supermarkets. So they set their prices here and then the government said, okay, your cost is going to be here. And it’s it’s you really feel for these guys. Right. They really try their best to provide fresh, high quality produce, but they are so stuck they have no way out. It’s good for robotics companies. They’re interested in working with you. It’s a really desperate situation.

Philip English

Yeah, well, as you said, especially if you’re competing for the bigger retailer business. I mean, that alone is a very competitive space. So you’ve probably gone in lean and then your prices are higher, then you’re in trouble straight away.

Florian Richter

You’re still always at risk of a bad year. Right. If you run out of water, you can’t keep growing your crops, then you have a big problem.

Philip English

Right. Thanks, Lauren. So that’s very interesting, really, to get like an insight into sort of the farming world. So what’s the sort of the opportunities and next steps for Muddy machines? How do we get in contact with you guys and from that perspective?

Florian Richter

Yeah, we’re about to launch a couple more positions on our Careers page on muddy machines. We have a section careers. We’re really interested in getting some year in industry students as soon as possible. We are now building a small fleet of robots to go into the field again in March time. We need help building them, we need help operating them. So I think this could be a very exciting time for graduates. We’re like, okay, you don’t have to know how to design a robot from scratch, but you will actually be working with a robot on a day to day basis and record the data that it generates and help us improve their performance. And yeah, if you spend the entire year with us, you could potentially see an entire product cycle from, from, from beginning to end. So get in touch through our website or hello@atmuddymachines.com, this goes directly into My and Chris’s inbox. So we’ll always pick this up and yeah, we’re now a team of about twelve people, especially interested in anyone with a more diverse background. It’s always very hard to promote, especially female talent in the robotics industry. So please do feel encouraged to get in touch.

Philip English

All right, perfect. Well now, as I say, thanks again for florian and thanks again for the overview of Money Machine. It’s very much appreciate your time and keep us pushing. I’m sure we’re speaking in the future to see how you guys are getting on. So thank you very much.

Florian Richter

Cheers, Philip It’s a pleasure.