In our second look at autonomous vehicles, we find one of our protagonists, John Deere, wading into the pool of the autonomous…

The agricultural industry colossus that we call John Deere acquired Blue River Technologies on Wednesday, 6 September, 2017. Blue River Technologies is a startup company that creates robots capable of identifying unwanted plants and shooting these identified plants with a high-accurate spray of herbicide. With these technologies becoming more precise at identifying the unwanted plants and having an accurate applicator for the herbicide, will this start to replace the current application technique? What benefits would this bring our farmers? Are farmers ready for the tech?

Current herbicide application techniques have evolved slowly over time. Creating a new innovative applicator, or software technology that helps to improve usage is a great investment for companies like John Deere, AGCO, or CASE. Investing into the future with no frame of reference can be extremely challenging though, especially when you are defining the baseline. Events like the agBOT Challenge are a great way to showcase the initial bots, nurture the ideas and designs, and watch the technology and ideas grow.

The benefits of utilizing robots and autonomous vehicles at the moment, but are not kept to: improve work flow, reduce human error, increase accuracies, and open up more time for the human to do whatever it is they need or want to do. This will change with the improvement of software, but the major changes will come when more farmers start to utilize the new machines and there is better field data, and actual usage.

Is this the beginning of the bot revolution? Is this the moment of genesis for a Wall-E like existence? Or will this revolutionize the industry

-        Patrick Hvolka

#AGBots #autonomousvehicles #Deere #CASE #Volvo #CAT #Liebherr #CLASS #AGCO