HIPHEN BOLSTERS ITS CUSTOM IMAGING SOLUTIONS TEAM
Meet the latest addition to the team: Eric Franchi – AgTech Robotics Director
👉 Hiphen Agricultural Imaging Solutions announces the addition of experienced robotics engineer Eric Franchi to its custom imaging systems team.
Hiphen has expanded its image analytics business with more autonomous rovers, tractor mounted sensor arrays, gantry, greenhouse PhenoStations and post-harvest quality control systems over the past 5 years complimenting its drone image processing business. According to CEO and founder Alexis Comar:
“As researchers and production operations become more aware of the value of imaging systems to deliver operation critical information about plant performance, our requests for systems has arrived at a place where we needed to augment our team with another engineer experienced in machinery and robotics.”
The field of image analysis has accelerated over the past decade, but the potential tools for agriculture have been underdeveloped. Advances in sensors and open-source libraries has made the promise of image analytics in agriculture start to bloom. As one of the leading organizations building solutions specifically for agricultural research and post-harvest quality control, Hiphen has grown from 10 people to nearly 30 agronomists and engineers by the end of 2023 all focused on delivering image analytical tools to agricultural professionals working to solve the challenges of 21st century agriculture.
Eric Franchi has 32 years’ experience in designing and commissioning complex systems in the field of mobile robots and industrial machines. He had a 27 year-long journey at ECA Robotics, a global leader in autonomous underwater vehicles. From software engineer to CTO, he gained most of his experience as head of engineering teams. He has been working on phenotyping machines for the past 5 years in cooperation with Hiphen, Arvalis and INRAe.
“Eric has been critical to the development of PhenoBuggy/PhenoStation systems which have significantly advanced our efforts to provide flexible, accurate and repeatable data collection” according to Arvalis' scientist Benoit De Solan.
Eric gave us his impressions about being part of the company:
“I’m excited to join such an innovative and passionate team and work not only on cutting edge phenotyping applications but also more blue-collar solutions that are more accessible to more researchers,” notes Franchi.
We are happy to have you onboard Eric! 🚀
Your Hiphen Team.
