A decade or two ago no one likely would have imagined the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas would become the chosen venue for farm equipment brands to debut their machines. But in the last couple of years, major brands have started to use it to reveal their newest technologies.
This year Kubota was back for a second time with a large display, showing both concept and production-ready autonomous machines.
“Last year was our first year at CES, really exposing what’s going on inside Kubota on development,” Kubota North America’s chief technology officer Brett McMickell says. “This exhibit is significantly expanded over what we did last year. We’re able to show a broader portfolio.”
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The brand showed its Smart Autonomous Sprayer, Smart Imager and Smart Pruner, but the centrepiece of its display this year is the KATR, an all-terrain, fully autonomous vehicle platform capable of carrying out a variety of tasks.
“The KATR is really a versatile machine,” McMickell says. “It’s solving several different problems in agriculture and construction. It’s really designed for a variety of off-road applications. We won a Best of Innovation Award. It’s a recognition of all the work that’s gone into it, as well as I think the potential for this product.
“At its core is an independent suspension on four wheels and it has two wheels in the centre to make sure it doesn’t get high-centred. The purpose of the independent suspension is it allows the platform to remain stable, even in off-road environments.”
The KATR will see its first commercial release early this year in Japan. Kubota has prototypes at work here in North America, to see how growers and those in other industries could best benefit from what it offers — so there is no firm release date yet for our market.
“We developed the KATR as kind of a versatile foundation for a lot of other solutions,” he adds. “And at CES we’ll be showing some of these other solutions in different settings. It allows you to build in different sensors for crop scouting and sensors for different applications like pruning and for straight up material transport. We’ve been exploring this for a while now.”
Last year Kubota showed its compact Agri Concept fully autonomous ag tractor at CES. After getting feedback, the brand redesigned it as the Agri Concept 2.0. The major difference this time is that it includes a standard operator’s station.
Inability to use the first version as a regular tractor was a common critique by potential customers — something most other brands have also heard when introducing driverless concept models in the past.
“Our customers said ‘You know what, I really enjoy driving Kubota vehicles, but you guys removed the cab,'” McMickell says. “‘I want the cab back. You’re taking away some of my enjoyment. Utility tractors are used for a bunch of things on the farm and I want to be able to have manual control of the vehicle.’ We’re showing the ability to go autonomous as well as drive it manually.”
A new feature of the Agri Concept 2.0 is increased communication ability. There are prominent LED displays that let people around it know what the machine is doing and whether or not they are interfering with its operation.
“The other thing you’ll see is we’re exploring voice command to have a more natural conversation with the vehicle,” McMickell says. “We found a lot of operators don’t necessarily configure the vehicle correctly for the application, so we’re putting a lot more intelligence into the vehicle. We’re showing what voice interaction could look like.”
Green ‘giant leaps’
John Deere had a lot to talk about at its display, too, with four new autonomous machine introductions.
“Today we’e going to take four giant leaps forward in John Deere’s autonomy journey,” said John Deere’s senior VP and chief technology officer, Jahmy Hindman, at a press conference. “When we talk about autonomy, we mean full autonomy. Nobody is in the machine. Using the John Deere Operations Center app on a smartphone they can interact with the machine, monitor the machine’s activity and see performance data.”
The brand pulled the wraps off a fully autonomous, battery-electric, zero-turn mower. It also revealed autonomy kits for 9RX and 5ML tractors as well as its 460 articulated, off-road dump trucks.
A key piece of technology for Deere’s new autonomous vehicles is a second-generation perception system which provides a much larger field of vision, allowing machines to work faster and pull wider implements.
“The impact of our second-generation technology is immense,” says director of high-value crop autonomy Igino Cafiero. “What it allows us to do is scale autonomy. In addition to the seven cameras around the tractor, we’ve also introduced Lidar sensors as well. Lidar provides depth information.”
That technology builds on what is currently used by the autonomous 8R tractor system for tillage the brand recently released.
“We started (autonomy) with the slowest, easiest job on the farm, which is fall tillage with a chisel plow,” says Willy Pell, CEO of Deere’s Blue River Technology subsidiary. “Now we’re excited to spread our wings beyond our initial use case.”
The second-generation perception kit will also be available as a retrofit kit for select Deere machines.
A new battery-electric concept tractor debuted as well, similar in size to Deere’s 5M models.
“This fully electric tractor is powered by up to five immersion-cooled batteries,” Cafiero says. “So farmers can meet their operational needs and sustainability goals as well. Fuel costs, maintenance costs and downtime are all reduced by about half. Today, we’re testing this electric tractor with real customers in real orchards.”
