WIM Wins Gyeongbuk ARES 2025 Agricultural Research Award, Convergence Category (Dec 2025)

WIM received the Excellence Award in the Convergence & Collaboration category at the Gyeongsangbuk-do Agricultural Research and Extension Services (ARES) 2025 Agricultural Research Awards in December 2025. The award recognizes a joint project with the ARES Digital Horticulture Division on an agricultural robot for greenhouse cucumber crop management.

The target task is leaf-removal automation — removing unnecessary leaves on cucumber vines to improve light penetration and airflow. The process has historically relied entirely on manual labor. WIM and the ARES research team deployed deep-learning object detection to identify target leaves and designed a dedicated end-effector capable of handling thin cucumber stems without damage, validating the system in field-representative conditions.

The judging panel weighted smart-farm integration and commercialization potential. WIM handled both deep-learning inference and manipulator control within a single stack — the WIM Robot Controller and the PLEM software platform — achieving the repeatability required for greenhouse deployment.

The award demonstrates that WIM's technology applies beyond manufacturing into agricultural settings. The company plans to continue collaborating with the Digital Horticulture Division and extend the approach to additional greenhouse crops.

WIM is a Korean B2B robotics company developing WIM Robot Controller — an NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX-based AI robot controller — and PLEM, a robot control software platform. The single-box architecture delivers 1ms (1kHz) real-time control with 275 TOPS (INT8) edge AI compute.