Few of us ever think about grain silos. But if you've eaten bread, corn, rice, soybeans or the animals that eat those as feed, you've benefited from one.

The design of grain silos is time-tested and simple. They're made tall rather than wide, both to minimize their footprint on the land and to allow gravity to help when it's time to empty them. They're made cylindrical for strength, as they need to securely hold hundreds of tons of grain. Established form aside, there is one persistent problem with silos that their design hasn't been able to solve, and that's due to the nature of grain.

Image: Dale Mahalko, Gilman, WI, USA - CC BY-SA 3.0

If you've ever transferred flour from one vessel to another, you know that poured particles tend to take a conical or mountainous shape. In a grain silo, these peaks must be knocked down; the grain needs to be leveled out for ventilation purposes, so that the temperature and humidity can stabilize. Furthermore, occasionally portions of the grain may crust over, and this crust needs to be broken up.

To handle the leveling and crust-breaking, the established method is for the farmer—or, likely, one of his children—to climb into the silo with a shovel, and manually manipulate the grain. This is an all-day job. On top of that:

"Grain bins are hot, dirty, and dangerous work places," writes the Grain Weevil Corporation. During the climbing and shoveling process "farmers are exposed to potential falls, entrapments, auger entanglements, and long term conditions such as Farmer's Lung. On the nearly 450,000 American farms with grain bins, farmers take these risks over six million times a year." 

Annual deaths from grain silo accidents are roughly 25 per year, and 1 out of 5 accident victims are teenage boys.

The Grain Weevil Corporation's eponymous solution is like a fun, robotic RC car with screw-drive wheels.

Image: Cecil Smalley Photography

One or more of these can be placed inside a bin, where they drive around autonomously, breaking up clumps and leveling the top surface. The farmer remains safely on the ground and can spend the time elsewhere.

"You'll open up the phone app and [tell it] 'Level Bin 2,' and then go watch the football game," says Chad Johnson, company CEO. "The robot will take care of all of that itself."

Here's how it works:

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The Grain Weevil was invented by Ben Johnson, Chad's son, when Ben was studying Electrical Engineering and Robotics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A family friend and farmer saw a robot Ben was working on, and had an idea. "If you can build that robot," the farmer commented, "you can build me a robot to keep me and my kids out of the grain bin." Together with Computer Engineering student Zane Zents, Ben developed the Grain Weevil.