13November 2026, Escalquens, FR: Naïo Technologies, a French agricultural robotics company, has introduced an autonomous machine designed to pull the tools farmers already own rather than carry a single built-in function, a departure from the dedicated weeding and seeding robots that have defined the company’s product line since 2011.
The company unveiled SANKA at the EIMA farm machinery show in Bologna, Italy, on November 10, 2026, where the show’s technical panel gave it the “2026 Technical Evolution” award. Naïo, based in Escalquens near Toulouse, said the 2.2 tonne, fully electric, tracked machine can carry up to one tonne of implements using a standard three-point hitch, a power take-off shaft and a hydraulic block, the same attachment points found on a conventional tractor. That means growers can keep using mowers, cultivators, sprayers or other implements they already own instead of buying robot-specific tools, an approach Naïo frames as lowering the up-front cost of automation.
According to the company, SANKA has been field-tested over four farming seasons before this launch, though Naïo’s announcement does not specify the year testing began. The robot navigates using guidance software the company has developed over more than 15 years, combined with RTK-GPS positioning for centimeter-level accuracy, and includes monitoring and human-detection cameras intended to let it operate safely without a supervisor present, day or night. Naïo said the machine can work autonomously for a full working day at speeds up to 6 kilometers per hour and can handle slopes of up to 30 percent, conditions common in vineyard and orchard terrain. The company estimates energy costs of under 1.30 euros per hectare.
Michelin partnership targets compaction and traction
A central piece of the design is a tracked undercarriage developed jointly with tire maker Michelin under a research partnership the two companies began in 2024. Naïo said Michelin applied expertise from its agricultural tracks and lightweight snowmobile tracks to create a patented system paired with a dynamic weight-balancing mechanism, intended to maintain traction and stability on rough or sloped ground while reducing soil compaction compared with wheeled equipment. Soil compaction from heavy machinery is a recognized problem in permanent cropping systems such as vineyards and orchards, where repeated passes over the same inter-row area over many years can reduce water infiltration and root growth. Naïo did not publish compaction or traction figures to quantify the improvement.
Naïo said SANKA targets wide-row vineyards, orchards, soft fruit operations, nurseries and agrivoltaic installations, where solar panels are integrated into active farmland, calling out mechanical weeding and tillage as the primary tasks the carrier is meant to automate. The company’s existing Oz, Ted, Orio and Dino robots, by contrast, are purpose-built for specific jobs such as inter-row weeding in vegetables or vineyards; Naïo says it has deployed more than 350 of those machines across five continents since the company’s founding.
SANKA is now moving into pre-series production, with Naïo targeting first customer deliveries in the second half of 2027, giving the company roughly a year to finalize manufacturing before the machine reaches farms commercially. The project received funding from the French government under its France 2030 investment program, alongside backing from public investment bank BPI France, impact investor Mirova and the regional government of Occitanie.
For growers weighing automation investments, a multi-purpose carrier changes the calculation: rather than buying a separate autonomous machine for each task, a single platform could, in principle, be repurposed across a season by swapping implements, though Naïo’s announcement does not provide a comparative cost analysis against either conventional tractors or its own single-task robots. Naïo is showing SANKA exclusively at its booth in Hall 32, Stand A16, at EIMA in Bologna.
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