Swimming Through Grain
One misstep in a grain silo and within seconds, you’re trapped. Within minutes, you’re out of air. Flowing grain behaves like quick sand, pulling a person down with astonishing force. Often, rescuers arrive too late. Even when help arrives, the grain’s grip can demand nearly a thousand pounds of force, more than enough to cause permanent injury. Many people don’t survive.
U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration illustration of how grain entrapment can occur.
Grain entrapment is the leading cause of death in agricultural confined spaces. But despite the risk, farmers and workers still enter silos every day because they have no other way to know what’s happening inside. To monitor millions of tons of stored grain, they rely on surface checks, temperature probes, and gut instinct. It’s not just inefficient. It’s incredibly dangerous.
That’s the problem Dr. Lorenzo Conti set out to solve. Not better rescue gear. Not faster detection. He asked a different question, how do we keep people from going in at all?
As a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, Conti studied how granular materials-sand, soil, and grain-flow and move. In the process, he discovered a groundbreaking behavior: a way for a device to move through grain, without getting stuck or sinking. That breakthrough became known as the Crover Effect and it led to a new kind of robot. Not a drone that flies but one that swims through grain
Dr. Lorenzo Conti, the Founder & CEO of Crover
The Crover robot is the world’s first subterranean drone for grain storage. It moves beneath the surface of grain silos, collecting accurate, real-time data on temperature, moisture, and compaction levels. That means safer storage, better quality control, and, above all, protecting human life
The Crover Robot, the world’s first subterranean drone for grain storage.
The innovation didn’t come from improving the old system. It came from stepping back, reframing the problem, and building something completely new.
At Think Variant, that’s what we believe real innovation is: not just making things better, but solving the real problem. Crover didn’t just build a robot. They redefined how we sense, store, and secure the future of food.
They solved the right problem and opened a new frontier in the process. That’s human innovation.
Crover is a Think Variant client. We’re proud to feature Crover because their work is exactly the kind of breakthrough that drives human progress.
