White Italian snails meet their match in Sydney University’s Ladybird robot

A ROBOT has been designed to combat a plague of snails, which cause damage to crops worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Ladybird has an array of sensors for detecting vegetable growth and pest species. Photo: The University of Sydney, Australian Centre for Field Robotics.

A ROBOT has been designed to combat a plague of slimy white Italian snails, which cause damage to crops worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The robot, a sleek machine dubbed Ladybird by its inventors at the University of Sydney, will hopefully do to snails what other traditional methods have so far failed to do.

The snails damage crops, clog machinery and contaminate grain.

Sam Davies, agronomist at Minlaton on the Yorke Peninsula, South Australia, first thought that robots might help when he saw a floor-cleaning robot on television.

Ladybird was designed and built specifically for the vegetable industry, with funding from Horticulture Australia Limited (HAL) and AUSVEG. It operates autonomously, moving across a crop and detecting pests and weeds using lasers, cameras and hyper-spectral cameras.

The location of snails within a crop is then recorded so spraying can be more precise.

Davies knows the problem well. “I’ve seen canola fields that couldn’t be harvested because of the snails. The farmer had to burn the lot. Another had the best wheat crop he’d ever had — premium quality that would fetch top dollar but because snails contaminated the grain it all had to go to animal feed and he lost $100 a tonne. The snails will have a crack at anything early in the season and can wipe out germinating crops. Their ability to build up numbers quickly is incredible.”

The robot was developed at the University of Sydney’s Australian Centre For Field Robotics, the world’s largest such centre, with funding from Horticulture Australia Limited and AUSVEG.

“A robot such as Ladybird can gather information day and night, creating field maps showing the location and numbers of snails in crops, and when they are likely to be on the move,” says senior research fellow David Fitch.

White Italian snails and other invasive snail species are thought to have arrived in Australia a century ago in grain sacks. They’ve prospered in the calcium-rich soils of South Australia’s Yorke Peninsula and, lacking sufficient natural enemies, are spreading into Victoria, NSW and Western Australia.

In field trials near Cowra over recent months Ladybird has been working in crops of beetroot, spinach and onions, monitoring plant growth and health factors. Crop surveillance is set to play a key role in agricultural efficiency in the future, minimising inputs and maximising returns.