AgXeed and Hexagon - At the forefront of autonomous farming

Autonomous technology can address agriculture’s critical challenges

In the rapidly evolving world of agriculture, the integration of autonomous technology is becoming a gamechanger. With a shrinking agricultural workforce and increasing environmental challenges, innovative solutions are essential. The partnership between AgXeed and Hexagon is driving efficiency, sustainability, and productivity in farming through advanced autonomous machines and helping farmers to overcome agriculture’s critical challenges:

• Labour shortages: The agricultural workforce is decreasing by approximately 4% each generation, leading to a significant labour shortage
• Environmental pressures: Climate change demands that farmers produce more in less time, with unpredictable weather patterns affecting crop yields.
• Soil health: Traditional farming equipment, often exceeding 20 tons, can damage soil health and reduce productivity.
• Water scarcity: Efficient water use is crucial as water availability becomes increasingly challenging.

AgXeed provides freedom and flexibility for the farmer

Founded in 2018, AgXeed is on a mission to revolutionise farming through autonomous technology. Their solutions allow farmers to focus on core activities while using resources sustainably. AgXeed’s advanced ecosystem, including scalable hardware and virtual planning tools, are designed to boost efficiency and productivity.

Peter Robinson, Regional Head of Sales for UK, NA and Australia at AgXeed, explains, “Farmers globally are accepting that digital agriculture is becoming very challenging. The labour force in rural areas is continually being depopulated, making it harder and harder. Changing climates around the world means farmers need to achieve more in a shorter time. For that reason, relying on solutions that can work unattended, unsupervised, and through the night is going to give them far greater output and ultimately serve them better in terms of crop yield and quality.”

Since 2022, AgXeed’s robots have been commercially available. By 2024, their network of 26 dealers has been distributing AgBots across North America, Europe, and Oceania. In 2025, AgXeed has more than 65 employees and over 110 robots in the field, and they are expecting to double this number every year.

AgXeed’s machines offer autonomous solutions tailored to farming needs, delivering maximum gains with minimal effort. By leveraging advanced technology, farmers can gain flexibility, conserve critical resources, and optimise operations. These solutions enable precise planning and real-time adjustments, ensuring smooth workflows and sustainable practices.

Driving an autonomous future together

Hexagon has provided a wide range of robust navigation solutions to the agriculture industry for over two decades, supporting the journey from precision agriculture into autonomous agriculture.

“Through our dedication to improving how we farm and our passion for innovation, working with ag robotics developers has been a natural fit for us.”, said Bernardo de Castro, Vice President of Strategy at Hexagon’s Agriculture Division. “By combining our agriculture expertise with Hexagon’s expansive knowledge and experience in autonomous systems, we are uniquely positioned to support our robotics partners.”

Hexagon provides AgXeed with the precise positioning technology, essential for autonomous farming. This includes GNSS positioning through its NovAtel brand of hardware, for accurate guidance that excels even in challenging conditions like near trees or field edges. We also provide a range of reliable GNSS signal correction sources that support autonomy’s need for redundancy.

Robinson highlights, “Hexagon’s hardware and software solutions give us the ultra-precise positioning that we need. So that’s both the GNSS positioning, which we see as particularly valuable under challenging GNSS conditions, and also the redundancy for steering autonomous machines around the world.”

AgXeed’s autonomous machines are designed to address the critical challenges in agriculture:

• Labor efficiency: Autonomous machines can operate 24/7, reducing the need for human labor and increasing efficiency.
• Climate adaptation: Autonomous machines can work unattended and do not suffer from fatigue, helping farmers manage their crops more effectively despite changing climate conditions.
• Soil health: Smaller, lighter autonomous machines help prevent soil compaction, promoting better crop growth and aligning with sustainable farming practices. “So, machines, vehicles, tractors, sprayers are now getting over 20 tonnes and we feel that’s too much for a lot of soil. Transitioning to slightly smaller machines and looking after the soil should help production,” Robinson notes.
• Water use: Precision irrigation technology ensures water is used efficiently, conserving this vital resource and maximising crop yields. Robinson adds, “The availability of water is becoming more challenging. By using autonomous machines, we can consistently improve the availability of water and also crop usage.”

Hexagon empowers its customers to bring new innovations to the agriculture industry faster, supporting the industry’s need for autonomy. “AgXeed’s focus on addressing the core challenges facing farmers while doing it in a way that reduces the industry’s impact on the environment is commendable.” adds Castro.

Solutions to precise positioning for autonomous farming

AgXeed uses Hexagon’s NovAtel SMART7-SI and SMART2 antennas, along with TerraStar and RTK corrections, to ensure their robots operate accurately and reliably. Combined, these solutions provide the redundancy required to help meet the stringent ISO standards and improve the safety of robots in agriculture.

“The need for redundancy in a positioning system is key to achieving a functionally safe solution and meeting industry standards for commercial machines.” noted Castro. “Hexagon’s solutions are helping developers like AgXeed get their machines into production faster by providing a reliable foundation, allowing them to focus on their machines’ use cases and uniqueness.”

Heading, IMUs, relative position and sensor synchronisation are all challenges that ag robotics developers are facing. Instead of needing to engineer each of these pieces, Hexagon has tailored a solution that solves all these problems with just two pieces of hardware.

“Hexagon’s hardware and software solutions have given us the versatility and integration options to allow us to create autonomous machines,” Robinson says. The collaboration between Hexagon and AgXeed is yielding significant benefits:

• Increased efficiency: Hexagon’s solutions helped reduce the drain on limited engineering resources, by providing reliable and easily integrated solutions to get AgXeed’s robots into the hands of farmers, faster.
• Safety: The safety of their machines is at the heart of AgXeed’s design, and Hexagon’s solutions provide the confidence they need with centimetre-level accuracy and redundancy.
• Adaptability: Hexagon’s GNSS positioning and vision-based perception technologies ensure that AgXeed’s machines can function accurately in diverse environments, from apple orchards in Canada to the wide-open plains of Australia.

Hexagon and AgXeed are at the forefront of autonomous farming, providing innovative solutions that enhance efficiency, sustainability, and productivity in agriculture. Robinson concludes, “Autonomy has been received incredibly well by farmers globally. It’s taken 20 years for autosteer to become mainstream globally, and that was a very long and painful process. But autonomy has accelerated that very quickly.”