A solar-powered weeding and seeing robot has been crowned "machine of the year" at this year's National Ploughing Championships in Ratheniska, Co Laois. FarmDroid FD20 is the world’s first fully automatic robot that can take care of both sowing and weed control. The robot, sitting at around 3m by 2.5m, costs around €95,000 and enables farmers a carbon-neutral and pesticide-free way to sow crops and control weeds while also reducing costs, eliminating the need for exhausting, manual work. With GPS technology, FarmDroid sows the crops in the field and marks precisely where every single crop is placed. While typical GPS systems have an accuracy of around a metre because satellites can drift slightly in space, FarmDroid uses RTK technology, a type of GPS which uses a receiver to correct its position to achieve up to 8mm of positional accuracy. Subsequently, it performs mechanical weed control without a camera, both between the rows and intra-row between each individual crop, securing effective, precise, and non-chemical weeding of the field.