A world first robot called the 'Ladybird' is being trialled among the onions, beetroots and spinach rows, of a farm in the New South Wales' central west.

It was a successful first trial for the University of Sydney's prototype, which cost about $1 million and a year's worth of scientific development.

"We've given it that name because it looks a little bit like one [a ladybird beetle], it has red covers with black spots from the solar panels.

"It's a solar powered, electric driven robot, with a variety of different sensors that we think are going to be useful for precision agriculture into the future," said Dr James Underwood.

Dr Underwood is a Senior Research Fellow from the university's Australian Centre for Field Robotics and developed the sensory equipment on the robot.

The ground robot is purpose-designed for the vegetable industry, to help farmers collect intelligence on nutritional information, autonomous farm surveillance, mapping, classification and detection of pests and, eventually, autonomous weeding and harvesting.

"The first phase for us out here near Cowra has been to test the ability of the robot to drive itself around the farm.

"It's a fully autonomous vehicle, it's capable of driving up and down the rows of the farm with very good precision, it went really well and basically worked straight out of the box."

The different sensors that Dr Underwood has developed will gather a wide range of farm intelligence.

"We've been testing what sort of information we get from a variety of different sensors that we have on board the platform.

"We have various different types of optical sensors such as stereo cameras, and hyper-spectral sensors and some laser range finders; with a combination of that data we can build up a 3D, very detailed type of picture, and map the farm down to the individual plant.

"It's our hope that with that data, and some algorithms that we design back in the lab, we can process that information to produce useful data for farmers to manage their crop."

Peak vegetable industry body, AUSVEG, awarded The Ladybird's lead researcher Professor Salah Sukkarieh Researcher of the Year for his work, at their recent annual conference in Cairns.

Ed Fagan owns the farm in Cowra in central-west NSW where the Ladybird is being trialled.

The vegetable grower says that the Ladybird robot's intelligence gathering around pests and crop nutrition will be invaluable for farmers,

"A lot of the time in horticulture, if you're short of an element in the plant, by the time you see a symptom it's too late, they will be able to pick up a nutrient deficiency before we see any symptoms.

"Secondly, you can use it at night at 2 o'clock in the morning and go out and do an insect survey, so things like cutworm popping out at night time, slugs, worms, things like that.

"Instead of getting out of bed at 3 o'clock in the morning and wandering around with a torch and looking at about five square metres, this thing could do two or three hectares at night and then in the morning you can just see what you've got," Mr Fagan says.

But Dr James Underwood says that it's about the big picture too.

"Ultimately, we hope that we can really maximise what you can get out of a unit of area of land in terms of growing produce, in terms of the quantity of yield but also the quality and food security," she says.