Over the past few weeks, we have been hard at work advancing our autonomy capabilities. At about noon on Monday (10/5/2020), we reached our goal of seeding cover crops on 100 acres of customer fields across the Midwest. We started in central Ohio, moved to western Illinois, and then on to NE Iowa. We are grateful for the support of our early customers, our partners at Carnegie Robotics, the Walton Family Foundation, and Prof. Scotty Wells’ group at the University of Minnesota.
Take a look at the view from behind and from 100-ft above via drone. In both cases, the machine was running in fully-autonomous mode with a safety operator monitoring it from the side of the field. There were no “kick outs” in the first video, and just one in the second (at minute 10)—note that the recovery (i.e., re-alignment between rows) was conducted by the remote operator. Over time, the frequency of these “human interventions” will drop off and will be solved by a safety operator monitoring dozens of machines.