Agritech
The world is impatient. Concerns about the environment and food security are becoming more pressing by the day. The agricultural sector is responding by actively researching and adopting transformative processes and systems across the value chain.
What we do
Regenerative agriculture
We apply a combination of optics, fluidics, chemistry and engineering skillsets to build novel sensors and systems. Moving beyond modelling, this provides industry leading measurement technologies to underpin regenerative agriculture practices.
Biologicals production and application
Additionally, our innovation consultants provide strategic guidance for building new digital farming platforms and defining the implications for next-generation products and services.
Precision agriculture and autonomous equipment
Featured insights
Our expertise
Understanding and optimising the flow of liquids, gases and heat can be critical design parameters. By understanding how heat will flow and how fluids and gases will interact with the proposed system, the time and cost of iteration and testing can be greatly reduced.
One of the earliest examples of our success in this field is inkjet printing, from which we created numerous spinouts, including billion-dollar companies Domino and Xaar.
Our consultancy teams are adept in nanofluidics, microfluidics and multiphase fluidics, with particular strengths in aerosol generation at a range of temperatures. We’ve also made significant progress in DNA liquid aerosols and nebulisers.
CC covers everything from high-reliability sensing for ultra-harsh environments to low-cost, low-power consumer devices. With broad expertise and a technology agnostic approach, we deliver optimal solutions across the whole spectrum of sensing.
Our work includes physical modelling (computational flow dynamics and finite element), analysis for new sensing principles and the development of innovative machine vision and machine learning systems.
Inexpensive yet powerful microcontrollers and GPUs mean more value can be derived from commodities like CMOS cameras, accelerometers and magnetic sensors. Through value engineering of established designs, and by using novel DSP algorithms to extract more data, we deliver huge leaps forward in performance while reducing costs.
We have the world’s largest independent wireless development team. It spans radio frequency, communications protocol, digital signal processing, power-optimised analogue and digital electronic design, embedded software, user experience and mechanical design.
Our consultancy expertise has led to the creation and development of several major wireless technologies and delivered a steady stream of disruptive breakthroughs. They include RF and satellite telecommunications to the world’s first wireless pacemaker and the ground-to-air radio system that controls more than 50% of the world’s air traffic.
We understand the extraordinary business potential and practical application of engineering biology. From novel materials to new medicines, data storage to living sensors, bioengineering offers new ways to sense, organise and process matter efficiently and cleanly. With our synthetic biology expertise, you can turn bioengineering theory into practice.
We help synthetic biology start-ups get innovative biodesign products to market. We assist them in scaling-up novel bioengineering processes – ensuring robust quality control, consistent product delivery and competitive cost.
Using our skills in biological manipulation, automation, measurement and process control, we help mature organisations already engaged in synthetic biology to build consistent and predictable processes for the rapid and cost-effective development of new products and services.
Markets and technologies evolve rapidly and unpredictably. Very few companies can afford to develop all relevant technologies, so tough choices need to be made. We help identify opportunities to ‘build, borrow or buy’ new technologies in anticipation of market requirements.
Business transformation is typically driven by a combination of internal, industry-related, and external factors, often rooted in technology. And whilst technology-based disruption is nothing new, the speed at which new offerings have built scale has been unprecedented.
The expertise we employ as technology strategy consultants has been in existence at Cambridge Consultants for decades. Because our consultants are engineers and scientists with deep technical insight, they can identify golden opportunities and recommend an innovation portfolio or technology roadmap.
We ensure that not only is the technology understood, but that the business model, market offerings and operations are all set up for success.
Our work
Our facilities
Optics labOur suite of optics labs enable us to build complex and high-precision optical layouts, typically for testing prototype designs and novel techniques before deployment. Featuring six high-spec optical benches with configurable interlocked controlled areas for high-power (class 4) laser work and specialist facilities for interferometry, spectroscopy, low-noise fluorescence imaging and photon counting. This space can be split into separate laser-controlled areas, allowing multiple experiments to run simultaneously, giving our optical engineers the capability to develop creative solutions without instrumentation restrictions. |
Electronic productionCC’s flexible, responsive and agile manufacturing facilities are ideally suited to electronic and electromechanical product builds, enabling us to rapidly build short product runs to an extremely high quality. We can build our own PCBAs using industrial representative equipment to ensure manufacturability during design. Having our own EPD facility is also extremely helpful in development, driving out DfX activities in eCAD and feeding test results back into the design process from an early stage. |
Engineering biology labsOur microbiology lab spaces enable us to genetically modify micro-organisms and characterise them. The CC bioengineering facilities are containment level 2 rated for handling pathogenic strains and our in-house libraries allow rapid modular DNA construct design and assembly. With deep synthetic biology expertise, we are particularly adept at building organisms as biological sensors for healthcare and industrial biotech applications. |
Anechoic test chamberOur custom anechoic radio and antenna test chamber is a highly sophisticated 5m cube. Inside, we carry out automated 3D measurements and visualisation of wireless device behaviour and test body-worn technology using body phantoms or real live test subjects to optimise real-word RF performance of products such as smart implants (including implanted telemetry), connected drug delivery devices and wearables. Our anechoic test chamber is available as a standalone service for industry and academic research. Explore the facility and find out how you can access this state-of-the-art service. |