Autonomy in Specialty Crops
News Reporter It’s time for your Farm of the Future Report. I’m Tim Hammerich.
Automation in row crop farming is difficult enough, but the problems get even more complex in speciality crops. Charlie Andersen and his team at Burro are helping farmers take the first step to bringing robots onto the farm.
Andersen… “You know, you think, if you re in the Midwest and you re a big tractor, you re high up, there s nothing above you. You can use high precision GPS to navigate around. If you re in a blueberry ranch or a table grape vineyard, you re under the canopy. You can t see the sky at all. There s oftentimes no cell phone reception. GPS is going to be super spotty. And so you ve got to be able to perceive the world with computer vision and recognize where can I drive? Where can t I drive? Is it a bucket? Is it a person? All those other things. So a lot of the seemingly basic questions around how to drive around in a crop like blueberr