Over the next ten years, can John Deere join Tesla and other Silicon Valley
tech behemoths as one of the top AI and robotics firms in the world?
This idea would seem out of place given the common misconception of the
185-year-old business as a heavy-metal maker of tractors, bulldozers, and
lawnmowers with the company's distinctive green and yellow paint jobs.
According to Jorge Heraud, vice president of automation and autonomy for
Deere, based in
Moline, Illinois, that is what the company envisions for the future. A
preview of this was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in
January of last year when
Deere unveiled
its fully autonomous 8R farm tractor, which is operated by artificial
intelligence rather than a farmer at the wheel.
Deere's nearly two decades of strategic planning and investment in
automation, data analytics, GPS navigation, internet-of-things connection,
and software engineering have culminated in the autonomous 8R. While a
significant portion of that R&D was conducted in-house, the business
also made a number of acquisitions and formed partnerships with agtech
companies, gaining access to their know-how and expertise in the
process.
This is the result of Heraud's and his team's insight that technology will
boost agricultural output, profitability, and sustainability.
We are very, very, very early in this process, according to Stephen
Volkmann, an equities research analyst at Jefferies, despite the fact that
Deere made a major impression at CES and captured the interest of the
investing community.
Less than 50 Deere tractors are currently autonomously driven globally, he
continued. Furthermore, Volkmann said that while Deere intends to have a
completely automated farming system for row crops in place by 2030, "in Wall
Street time, it's an eternity."
Deere is now making money and adding value with well-proven automated
technologies that can be adapted to its current tractors, such GPS-based
self-steering and precision seeding that calculates how deeply and widely to
space plants. Before you can give kids full autonomy, Volkmann said those
conditions must be met.
Without even mentioning the commercial advantage, the autonomous 8R marks a
significant advancement in contemporary agtech. "Everyone believed [complete
autonomy] was pie in the sky until its debut at CES," said Scott Shearer,
chair of the Ohio State University department of food, agricultural, and
biological engineering.
Although none of the autonomous tractor ideas are now commercially
accessible, Shearer estimated that there are about 30 distinct ones being
worked on throughout the world. But when Deere, which holds 60% of the North
American tractor market, introduces one, "reality kicks in," Shearer
said.
This situation is a reflection of Deere's autonomous plan. "The AI we
deploy combines computer vision and machine learning," Heraud added. These
fields of study were actively being pursued at Silicon Valley company Blue
River Technology, which Deere acquired in 2017 for $305 million. With the
help of dozens of advanced cameras and processors, Blue River's "see and
spray" robotics platform can discriminate between agricultural plants and
weeds when dispensing herbicides.
Six stereo camera pairs that are mounted on the autonomous tractor can
"see" an impediment in the field, such as a rock, a log, or a human, and
estimate its size and distance. A deep neural network assesses each pixel in
an image taken by the cameras and determines whether the tractor should go
forward or stop in around 100 milliseconds.
In order for the tractor to utilize machine learning, Heraud explained,
"we've selected hundreds of thousands of photographs from different
agricultural areas and under varied weather and lighting circumstances. The
farmer can also use this feature to remotely control the tractor while doing
something else, rather than having to sit on it.
Heraud was alluding to autonomous driving, another element of Deere's
agtech jigsaw that was completed when the company paid $250 million to
acquire Bear Flag Robotics
last year. The automated navigation technology from Silicon Valley firm Bear
Flag may be put onto pre-existing tractors. The most recent version of the
Deere 8R tractor, which first hit the market in 2020, incorporates Blue
River technology to have autonomous capabilities.
Deere has bought AI assets from two other leading agtech companies since
the CES release. In April,
Deere and GUSS Automation, a company that has created semi-autonomous orchard and vineyard sprayers,
established a joint venture. A single operator may remotely manage up to
eight GUSS (Global Unmanned Spray System) sprayers at once while using a
laptop thanks to AI and IoT. Regardless of height or canopy size, GUSS can
locate trees and calculate the appropriate amount of spray to apply to each
one.
A month later, according to
The Robot Report, Deere announced the purchase of multiple patents and other intellectual
property from AI company Light. By employing extra cameras and simulating
the anatomy of the human eye, Light's depth-perception platform enhances
existing stereo-vision systems and enables more precise 3D vision. The
technology from Light will be included into next iterations of Deere's
autonomous agricultural machinery.
Deere has set up a Startup Collaborator program to test cutting-edge
products with customers and dealers without a more formal commercial
engagement in order to keep a close watch on other agtech R&D. In order
to retain them in the fold, Volkmann added, "the aim is that they locate the
jewels before they become evident to [competitors]."
Four Growers, a
Pittsburgh-based startup that offers robotic harvesting and analytics for
high-value crops, beginning with greenhouse tomatoes, and
Burro, a Philadelphia-based
company that makes small, autonomous robots that can help farm workers with
various conveyance tasks, are among the current crop.
Unsurprisingly, Deere's main rivals have been working on agricultural
machinery automation and autonomy as well. According to Seth Crawford,
senior vice president and general manager of the Duluth, Georgia-based
company's precision agricultural and digital business,
AGCO, whose brands
include Massey Ferguson and Fendt, "has been automating farming operations
since the mid-1990s." We are currently in a phase of machine autonomy that
we refer to as supervised autonomy, he explained. "Fully automated
operations are the talk, but farmers are prepared to pay for automation on a
feature-by-feature basis,"
Crawford stated that although Deere is concentrated on giving its own
agricultural equipment complete autonomy, AGCO is eyeing a larger retrofit
market. We'll have a performance-improving retrofit kit accessible for many
brands of machines in the summer of 2023, he promised. He made reference to
Deere's 8R and added, "Where others claim we provide you autonomy with a
half-million-dollar tractor, we have kits that allow you to achieve it with
your existing fleet. Farmers who want to use technology to improve their
results but don't want to switch their entire fleet and make that
significant investment represent a major market potential, in our
opinion.
A vehicle known as the Autonomous Concept Vehicle was brought to the Farm
Progress Show in 2016 by Case IH, a division of London-based
CNH Industrial. The modern, driverless prototype tractor gave away the idea of autonomy
at the time. Six years later,
Case IH introduced its Trident 5550 autonomous applicator
at the Farm Progress Show in September.
The 2017 release Trident 5550 is a cab-equipped spreader for dry and wet
materials in agricultural areas. The agricultural show model was updated
with Raven Industries' autonomous technology, which CNH purchased in June
2021 for $2.1 billion. The improved Trident uses self-driving technology,
cutting-edge cameras, and AI to evaluate a constant stream of photos in
order to detect impediments, much as Deere's autonomous 8R.
According to Chris Dempsey, worldwide director at Case IH Precision
Technology, the business intends to make a small number of the equipment
available for farmers to test before going on sale sometime next year. The
precise release date is still to be established. Before we launch, he
stated, "We want to get user feedback and understand their trust level [in
autonomy]."
