Kinze's Autonomy Play

At the Farm Progress Show last week, I had to make a stop at the Kinze Manufacturing booth to get the lowdown on what it has dubbed its Autonomy Project. Two years in the making, the Autonomy Project is Kinze’s effort to make unmanned farm equipment a reality for US producers.

I caught up with Luc van Herle, Kinze’s global sales manager, to get some background on the effort. His enthusiasm is infectious as he describes the reasons for moving forward on the Autonomy Project, and the results of two years of development and testing. The initiative was envisioned and has been driven from the top by Kinze president John Kinzenbaw, who believes that the current “size race” in ag equipment will give way to smaller vehicles that can be more easily controlled through some measure of autonomous control.

The first step in the process was to prove the concept, so Kinze turned to a company called Jaybridge Robotics. “They are a technology company that has done autonomy like this for the military and mining industries, where this is relatively commonplace today,” says van Herle. Kinze provided all the variables and particulars that a planter, the first operation out of the box to be tested, would have to consider to run autonomously. It was up to Jaybridge to work out the algorithms that would make the planter behave the way it’s supposed to.

“This is not a remote control process, this is total autonomy,” asserts van Herle. “Yout input field boundaries, account for water and obstacles, load it into the tractor and planter and let it go.” In demonstrations, van Herle notes that it takes a few minutes to actually get moving. “”It’s thinking. It’s creating a map and a plan for the best way to plant the particular field,” he explains. It does it by itself, as if an operator is there, lifting up the planter, making the turns, and heading back down to plant the next row.

The tricky part will be balancing safety with efficiency. There will be all sorts of safeguards to keep the machine from harming itself, objects, animals, people, etc. through the use of a wide range of sensors. The machine is designed to essentially stop operations when anything goes wrong, but a key part of the commercialization process will be reducing “false positives” that stop the equipment when it doesn’t need to. Van Herle says that safety is the grower’s biggest concern with autonomous tractors, and is a top priority as the project moves forward.

On the other hand, many growers are ready to take delivery yesterday. “The response from growers has overwhelmed us,” says van Herle. Beyond early adopters, all growers are experiencing the employment crunch in rural America and seem willing to trade searching for a competent driver for autonomy technology.

But don’t get your checkbooks out just yet. The next, and arguably more difficult step, will be commercializing the technology, and is certainly several years off.

It made me recall the early days of variable rate technology in the 1980s, which utilized computer technology that’s primitive against today’s standards, and ground based radio towers for guidance. It really took the availability of GPS nearly a decade later to move VRT along. What’s different about autonomy is that much of the technological breakthroughs are already here, and it’s more a matter of reapplying it to agriculture.

So, what do you think? Are you ready to surrender the reins of your tractor to an autonomous system? Feel free to share your thoughts here and we’ll discuss it more in the weeks ahead.