One of the ways that ROGO brings total accountability to soil sampling is by building systems that eliminate errors throughout the process.

Core Settings

Let’s talk about core settings. When an operator shows up to a field, instead of manually entering all the specific settings required for that field that the client wants, we automatically load what the client has entered into our portal into that robot every single time. Settings like the depth of every single core, the quantity of cores for that sample, and the spacing and distribution of cores for that sample.

So if we’re on one side of the road doing a grid system of eight cores by 8 inches deep on a 45 degree angle, and on the other side of the road sampling a zone system with four stops per zone and two cores per stop at seven inches deep – it’s correct every single time.

Barcoded Bags

The next step is barcoded bags, which prevent human labeling issues. We have all the information inside the mission for those samples, as well as the sync information that the lab needs to send data back to the client’s software. So we automatically link that mission data to the sample bag when that bag gets scanned.

At that point the only remaining error is making sure that the bag is scanned to the right sample. And the way we solve that is, once the robot recognizes that there has been a good sample taken, it expects a barcode coming very soon. If it doesn’t see a barcode before another sample is completed, it enforces that before moving on.

ROGO’s Solution

As the operator is scanning those samples, they’re scanning them into a box that also has a digital twin in our cloud system. So when the operator closes the box, there’s a manifest of every single sample in that box. This means that whether it’s shipped UPS or Courier, the lab has every bit of information they need to efficiently check in that box and run the data back to our customer.

This system resulted in an issue rate of under one in a thousand last year for shipping soil samples to the lab. So that is a little overview of how we at ROGO eliminate errors in the sampling process.