A Cruise robotaxi failed to brake quickly enough behind a city bus in San Francisco. | Source: Cruise

Cruise issued a voluntary recall with the National Highway Transporation Safety Administration (NHTSA) in response to a minor collision where a Cruise autonomous vehicle (AV) hit the back of a San Francisco bus. The recall affects 300 AVs. 

The Cruise AV involved in the crash failed to brake quickly enough after the city bus in front of it slowed, according to the company. While the vehicle did brake, it applied the brakes too late and rear-ended the bus at about 10 MPH, Cruise said.

After the collision, Cruise began an investigation and found the cause of the crash was an error related to predicting the movement of articulated vehicles, which are vehicles with two sections connected by a flexible joint allowing them to bend in the middle, like the bus in the accident. 

According to Cruise, the robotaxi saw the front section of the bus and recognized that it was an articulated vehicle that could bend, so it predicted the bus would move as connected sections with the rear section following the predicted path of the front section. As the bus pulled out, Cruise said the AV reacted based on the predicted actions of the front end of the bus, which it could no longer see, rather than the actual actions of the rear section of the bus, making it slow to brake. 

Once the company found the root cause of the accident, it started working on a software update that it said would improve performance near articulated vehicles. When the update was completed, tested and validated, Cruise’s operations team rolled the change out to the fleet, just two days after the incident occurred. Results from testing indicate the specific issue that caused the accident won’t recur after the update. 

“Our data and simulations showed that it was exceptionally rare. At the time of the incident, our AVs had driven over 1 million miles in fully driverless mode. We had no other collisions related to this issue, and extensive simulation showed that similar incidents were extremely unlikely to occur at all, even under very similar conditions,” Cruise founder and CEO Kyle Vogt wrote in a blog. “The collision occurred due to a unique combination of specific parameters such as the specific position of the vehicles when the AV approached the bus (with both sections of the bus visible initially, and then only one section), the AV’s speed, and the timing of the bus’s deceleration (within only a few seconds of the front section becoming occluded).

“We will undoubtedly continue to discover ways in which we can improve, even if that involves changing software that is currently deployed in the field,” he continued. “We think any potential improvement to roadway safety is worthwhile, and we will approach it with the same level of rigor as we’ve demonstrated here. These continuous improvements are likely to make voluntary recalls commonplace. We believe this is one of the great benefits of autonomous vehicles compared to human drivers; our entire fleet of AVs is able to rapidly improve, and we are able to carefully monitor that progress over time.” 

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Gatik recently announced a multi-year commercial collaboration with Kroger to transport customer orders within Kroger’s Dallas distribution network. 

Starting sometime in Q2 of 2023, Gatik’s medium-duty autonomous box trucks will be transporting products from a Kroger Customer Fulfillment Center (CFC) in Dallas, Texas to multiple retail locations. Gatik’s autonomous trucks will operate with safety drivers in the vehicles for now, but the company plans to eventually take them out. 

Gatik’s trucks feature a cold chain-capable 20′ foot box to transport ambient, refrigerated, frozen goods. The collaboration involves consistent, repeated delivery runs multiple times per day, seven days per week, across Kroger’s Dallas distribution network. Each trip, from a CFC to a retail location, typically involves around 60 miles of driving round trip, according to Gatik’s Head of Policy and Communications Richard Steiner. 

The company has always been interested in automating the middle mile. Steiner joined the company in 2019, just two years after it was founded, and has helped it grow into a now 150-person team. 

“What we’ve seen over the last few years, even prior to the pandemic, is e-commerce going through the roof,” Steiner said. “Consumers like you and me no longer want to wait three, four, or five days for goods, we want them within a one to two-hour pickup window.” 

According to Steiner, this change in the way people shop has led to smaller distribution centers, more micro fulfillment centers and more customer fulfillment centers closer to where those customers live. This is where automating the middle mile, between these fulfillment centers and retail locations, can greatly increase the speed and number of orders fulfilled. 

“A really, really critical point to note about what we’re doing there is we’re increasing the delivery frequency,” Steiner said. “So that means that Kroger’s customers have a greater range of same-day pickup times as well as greater flexibility with cut-off times to place their orders.”

Automating the middle mile also means getting autonomy into the hands of Gatik’s customers quickly, because the team only needs to operate its AVs on repeatable routes instead of anywhere in a city a person might want to go. 

“Compared to the other applications of technology, either long haul or passenger transportation, [middle-mile transportation] is simpler,” Steiner said. “We are constraining the challenge of autonomy by focusing on fixed known repeatable point-to-point routes. So whereas the passenger transportation models require mapping out an exponentially larger and larger geo-fenced area to serve an increasing number of consumers . . . We focus on a limited number of pickup locations and drop off locations, which means that we know our routes more intimately than anyone else on the planet.”

While Gatik doesn’t have a specific timeline for when it will be able to pull out its safety drivers from its trucks in Texas, with each deployment, including its deployment with Walmart in Arkansas and with Loblaw in Ontario, the process keeps moving faster.

“With Walmart in Arkansas, we began commercial operations in June of 2019. We pulled the driver out in August of 2021, so about two years right?” Steiner said. “With Loblaw, we began commercial operations in January 2020 and pulled the safety driver out 19 months after that. So we went from 24, 25 months to 19.”

Gatik has three phases that it works through for deployments. The first involves millions of miles of simulated training, which is followed by the second phase, which involves private closed course track testing, first with safety drivers and then without. Finally, the Gatik team moves into its public testing phase. 

With or without a safety driver, Gatik’s trucks begin generating revenue for its customers on day one. 

“We’ve now done over half a million customers orders across our customer base in North America,” Steiner said. “Every single one of those deliveries has been revenue generating. So we’re not testing for testing’s sake. This is a real business. This is a revenue-generating business.” 

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Bill Gates recently had the opportunity to take a ride in London inside a Wayve autonomous vehicle (AV) and gave his thoughts on the future of driving in a new Gates Notes blog post.

While most AVs work by extensively mapping out the areas they drive in, Wayve uses deep learning techniques to allow its cars to drive anywhere humans can. To train its software, Wayve uses hundreds of millions of data samples of real-world and simulated driving. 

Last year, Wayve announced it was working with Microsoft, which Gates co-founded, to leverage the supercomputing infrastructure needed to support the development of AI-based models for AVs on a global scale. Microsoft also participated in the company’s $200 million funding round in January 2022. 

The Wayve AV was able to safely navigate the busy streets of downtown London with a safety driver present behind the wheel. 

In his blog post, Gates seemed cautiously optimistic about the future of AVs. He predicted that it’s likely the AV industry will reach a tipping point between SAE level 2 and 3 vehicles, or, in other words, vehicles that can only provide assistance to drivers through autonomous features, and vehicles that take the control out of the drivers’ hands. 

“Over the next decade, we’ll start to see more vehicles crossing this threshold. AVs are rapidly reaching the point where almost all of the technology required has been invented. Now, the focus is on refining algorithms and perfecting the engineering,” Gates wrote in his post. “There have been huge advances in recent years—especially in sensors, which scan the surrounding environment and tell the vehicle about things it needs to react to, like pedestrians crossing the street or another driver who swerves into your lane.”

Gates predicts that the first AVs that will see widespread adoption will be for long-haul trucking, then deliveries, and then autonomous taxis and rental cars will become common.

Widespread adoption of AVs, however, will come with other issues. For example, when an AV is involved in an accident, insurance companies will have to determine if the blame falls on the passenger or the company that programmed the car software. Gates predicts that these kinds of changes, along with regulatory changes, could take decades to fully come to fruition. 

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Last Thursday, March 23, 2023, a Cruise robotaxi, operating autonomously and with no driver or passengers in the vehicle, was involved in a minor accident with a San Francisco Muni bus. No one was injured in the incident. Both the Cruise vehicle and Muni bus received some damages, with the robotaxi seeming to take the brunt of the impact, according to Forbes.

While there aren’t many details about the accident, Cruise tweeted the following brief statement after the incident: “Yesterday, one of our vehicles made contact with the rear of a Muni bus. No injuries were reported, and there were no passengers present in the Cruise AV. We are investigating the incident and will take follow-up actions if appropriate.”

Robotaxi companies are typically quick to clear things up if their vehicles aren’t at fault in incidents. So many are assuming the Cruise robotaxi rear-ended the bus, based partly on Cruise saying in the statement one of its vehicles “made contact with the rear of a Muni bus.”

This incident happened just days after another Cruise robotaxi drove through caution tape that closed off a road where overhead trolley wires had fallen during a major high-wind storm. The vehicle hit the wires which were powered off at the time. Had the power lines been live when the vehicle hit them, the incident could have been much worse.

In December, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced it was opening an investigation into the company’s automated driving system. In a filing, NHSTA said it was interested in two different issues that had been reported to the administration that both result in the robotaxis becoming hazards for others on the road. 

NHSTA’s first concern is with the company’s robotaxis reportedly braking too hard in certain circumstances. The administration received three reports of a Cruise vehicle braking too hard in response to a car approaching them quickly from the rear, resulting in the Cruise vehicle being rear-ended in all three incidents. 

The administration’s second concern is with the robotaxis becoming immobilized on the road. NHSTA has received several reports of Cruise vehicles stalling on the road, with no human operators present. NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) opened a preliminary investigation to determine the scope and severity of both issues. 

Last week, Cruise filed an application with the California DMV to test its robotaxis statewide. The company has been working to expand its services in several areas, including in Austin and in the suburbs of Phoenix. It’s also working to roll out its purpose-built Origin vehicle on public roads in San Francisco. 

Last month, Cruise announced its fully driverless vehicles have traveled over one million miles. A majority of Cruise’s fully driverless miles were driven in San Francisco, where the company first rolled out its robotaxis in November 2021. 

The Robot Report reached out to Cruise for details on both incidents but hasn’t heard back as of press time. If we do get any more information, this story will be updated.

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Zoox recently began testing its purpose-built robotaxis on public roads. | Source: Zoox

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association (AVIA) has unveiled policy recommendations aimed to promote the use of autonomous vehicles (AVs) for congress and the US Department of Transportation (USDOT). 

According to the AVIA, these federal policy recommendations will help unlock AVs’ full capacity to provide safety, mobility and economic opportunities for Americans. The policies also aim to maximize the deployment and commercialization of safe autonomous technology across the country. 

The AVIA’s framework includes all modes of AVs, including zero-occupancy delivery vehicles, trucks and passenger cars. The framework includes steps AVIA thinks USDOT should take and the necessary components of federal legislation that will support the advancement of AVs in the US. 

The AVIA recommends that congress should enact federal legislation that: 

• Will support US innovation in AVs with a clear federal framework that outlines necessary statutory and regulatory elements that are critical to the AV industry
• Encompasses all vehicle types
• Reforms and expands the vehicle exemption process
• Expands AV testing and evaluation
• Directs the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to complete Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) rulemaking 
• Codifies the preclusion of a “make-inoperative” provision for dual-use vehicles
• Codifies the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA’s) interpretation that Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSRs) do not require a human driver in vehicles 
• Preserves the federal role in regulating motor vehicles and interstate motor carrier activity 
• Expands access to mobility by not requiring a driver’s license to be a passenger in an AV
• Protects confidential information 
• Studies the economic, accessibility and equity of AVs
• Studies and encourages the development of the AV industry workforce 

“AVs are testing and operating in states around the country, bringing people and goods to where they need to go. America is currently the leader in AV technology, but other countries are surging forward. It is time for the U.S. to solidify our leadership, and these policy recommendations will expand opportunities for AVs to increase road safety, create new mobility options, and support economic growth and new jobs,” said Jeff Farrah, Executive Director of AVIA.

To advance AVs, the AVIA encourages USDOT to:

• Update regulations to better support AV deployment
• Accelerate the path for novel design vehicles 
• Complete the final rule on safe integration of autonomous driving systems (ADS) in commercial vehicles 
• Promote AV safety by developing technical standards, conducting research, convening the industry to establish common approaches and fully leveraging existing data collections to inform future regulatory approaches to AV safety
• Preserve foreign market access through active engagement with other governments and international bodies

“We support The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association in recommending a federal framework for AV policy. While we have effectively partnered with local officials to safely introduce AVs into their communities, a federal framework will accelerate the U.S.’s progress in this transformative technology. Federal guidelines that support innovation while maintaining the AV industry’s rigorous safety standards will support the growth of the sector and ensure the U.S. stays competitive with future mobility advancement. Driverless vehicles have the potential to make transportation safer and more accessible, and we’re eager to work with our public partners to make those benefits a reality,” Sam Wempe, Director of Government Relations at Motional, said. 

The AVIA’s members are from leading AV companies across the world. The association works with lawmakers, regulators and the public to realize the safety and societal benefits of autonomous vehicles. 

Currently, there aren’t any federal regulations for AVs. Companies that have begun to roll out AVs with no human drivers behind the wheel, like Cruise or Waymo, work with local regulators to ensure their systems are able to drive on public roads. 

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On the show today, Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman discuss breaking news about the uncloaking of Figure.AI, a new humanoid robot company with a mission to create an affordable and ubiquitous humanoid robot.

They also discuss the features of the latest ChatGPT release, which delivers scalable infrastructure to support large enterprise interaction with ChatGPT via API. This formalizes the opportunity for roboticists to programmatically interact with ChatGPT for robotic applications. What will you do with it?

Our featured guest his week is Dejan Pangercic, co-founder and CTO of APEX.AI. Dejan talks about software development for autonomous vehicles and how APEX.AI built a hardened operating system for autonomous vehicles around ROS 2. We discuss uses for APEX.AI in both on-road vehicles and for agriculture.

Episode timeline:

06:37  ChatGPT for roboticists

11:24  Uncloaking of Figure.ai

32:20 Autonomous vehicle news: Waymo starts fully driverless testing in LA, Argo.AI relaunched as Latitude.AI. Tesla FDS recall.

40:02 Interview with Dejan Pangercic

Robotics Summit & Expo (May 10-11) returns to Boston

Links from the show today:

• Argo AI team joins Ford’s new self-driving startup Latitude AI
• OpenAI releases APIs for production use of ChatGPT
• Figure.ai website
• Figure Promises First General-Purpose Humanoid Robot (IEEE Spectrum)
• Today, Figure emerges from stealth. (LinkedIn)
• APEX.AI Grace
• APEX.AI IDA

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Latitude AI will focus on autonomous driving technology for Ford vehicles. | Source: Ford

Ford today launched Latitude AI, a subsidiary developing new automated driving technology. The company will focus on creating a hands-free, eyes-off-the-road automated driving system for next-generation Ford vehicles.

This new self-driving company is taking on 550 employees that were part of Argo AI, Ford’s previous self-driving project that was shut down in October 2022. These employees worked across machine learning and robotics, cloud platforms, mapping, sensors and compute systems, test operations, systems and safety engineering. 

Latitude AI will support Ford’s strategic shift that came last year to focus more on creating automated driving technologies for personally owned vehicles. This separates Latitude from Argo AI, which focused on creating autonomous robotaxis. 

Latitude AI’s work will build off of Ford’s hands-free, highway-driving technology called BlueCruise, which has already logged more than 50 million miles. Latitude hopes to automate the parts of driving that can be the most tedious, stressful and unpleasant, it said, like bumper-to-bumper traffic or long stretches of highway. 

This shift will also set itself apart from autonomous vehicle companies like Cruise and Waymo, which are both focused on creating autonomous robotaxis, and puts itself in the same ring as Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta software, which recently underwent a recall. 

“We see automated driving technology as an opportunity to redefine the relationship between people and their vehicles,” said Doug Field, chief advanced product development and technology officer, Ford Motor Company. “Customers using BlueCruise are already experiencing the benefits of hands-off driving. The deep experience and talent in our Latitude team will help us accelerate the development of all-new automated driving technology – with the goal of not only making travel safer, less stressful and more enjoyable, but ultimately over time giving our customers some of their day back.”

Sammy Omari, executive director of ADAS technologies at Ford, will serve as the CEO of Latitude AI. Ford appointed Peter Carr as the company’s chief technology officer, who will oversee Latitude’s product and technical development and David Gollob as president. Gollob will be responsible for the company’s business operations. 

“We believe automated driving technology will help improve safety while unlocking all-new customer experiences that reduce stress and in the future will help free up a driver’s time to focus on what they choose,” Omari said. “The expertise of the Latitude team will further complement and enhance Ford’s in-house global ADAS team in developing future driver-assist technologies, ultimately delivering on the many benefits of automation.”

Latitude AI is headquartered in Pittsburgh, where Argo AI was located and has additional engineering hubs in Dearborn, Michigan and Palo Alto, California. The company also operates a highway-speed test track facility in Greenville, South Carolina. 

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All of Tesla’s vehicles can be equipped with its $15,000 Full Self Driving software add-on. | Source: Tesla

Earlier this month, Tesla issued a voluntary safety recall at the request of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) after the NHTSA determined that the company’s advanced driver assistance feature, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta software, could create a “crash risk.” 

The recall affects almost 363,000 Model S, Model 3, Model X and Model Y vehicles equipped with FSD. Users that already have FSD installed and activated can still use the software, but won’t see any new features until Tesla rolls out an over-the-air (OTA) software update to address the issues. Tesla hasn’t given any details on when it expects to make this update available, but the company did say that no immediate action needs to be taken by Tesla owners. 

While users who already have FSD can continue to use it, Tesla is putting a hold on new installations of the software, according to a new company support page. The support page clarifies that, despite its name, the FSD beta software is “an SAE Level 2 driver support feature”, meaning the software does not make the vehicle fully autonomous. 

SAE outlines six levels of driving automation, from Level 0, where the car has features that provide warnings and some assistance features like automatic braking, to Level 5, where a vehicle can drive itself under any road conditions. Level 2 falls just below the automated driving features levels, and is outlined as the vehicle providing steering and braking and acceleration support to the driver. 

SAE’s six levels of automation. | Source: SAE

Level 3 and above systems require more regulatory approval and extensive testing to roll out onto public roads. A driver cannot be taken out of the driver’s seat completely until a vehicle achieves Level 4 automation. 

When using FSD, all drivers are responsible for the operation of the vehicle and should keep their hands on the wheel at all times to be able to intervene as needed. 

Tesla outlined four circumstances that its FSD beta software has been struggling with: traveling or turning through intersections with a stale yellow traffic light, coming to a full stop at stop signs, particularly when the car doesn’t perceive any other road users at the signs, adjusting speeds while driving through variable speed zones and properly changing lanes to continue going straight when the vehicles find themselves in turn-only lanes. 

On Monday, Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk were sued by shareholders accusing them of overstating the effectiveness and safety of Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD technologies, according to reporting from Reuters. 

The proposed class action lawsuit was filed in San Francisco federal court and states that shareholders believe Tesla defrauded them for over four years with false and misleading statements. These statements, according to the lawsuit, concealed how Tesla’s technology “created a serious risk of accident and injury.”

The lawsuit also claims that Tesla’s share price fell several times as the truth of Tesla’s technology came to light, including after NHTSA began investigating the company’s technology. 

The post Breaking down Tesla’s Full Self Driving recall appeared first on The Robot Report.

Waymo announced today that its starting completely driverless testing in Los Angeles, making it the third city to see completely driverless Waymo vehicles. 

Following a rigorous cycle of validation and safety readiness evaluation, @Waymo is starting fully-autonomous (no human driver) testing in LA. Thrilled by the data confirming, once again, how well our ML-based 5th-gen Driver generalizes across cities! pic.twitter.com/hd0XU5zecT

— Dmitri Dolgov (@dmitri_dolgov) February 27, 2023

Waymo announced in October that LA would be its next ride-hailing city, after rolling out its services in San Francisco, Phoenix and the Phoenix suburbs. 

The post Waymo starts fully driverless testing in LA appeared first on The Robot Report.

Motional’s autonomous ride-hailing service in Las Vegas is now available at night. The rides will be given in Motional’s IONIQ 5 robotaxi with a safety driver behind the wheel, for now, on certain routes along the Las Vegas Strip. Motional hopes to remove the human operators later this year. 

Since Motional first rolled out its service in August 2022, over 90% of passengers have given the robotaxi rides a five-star rating, according to the company. The robotaxis have driven more than 2 million autonomous miles and conducted over 125,000 public rides without an at-fault accident. 

When the company first started its service in Las Vegas, Motional gave robotaxi exclusively during the daytime so that the company could be sure its technology was safe enough to operate at night. 

According to Jared Miles, a senior technical program manager at Motional, the company’s robotaxis use a sensor suite made up of more than 30 cameras, radars and lidars to navigate the world. Each of these sensors has its own strengths, for example, high-resolution cameras can help the vehicle tell the difference between objects in the vehicle’s path and background structures. 

For night driving, the vehicle needs to rely on sensors that it might not use much during the day, like radars that use radio waves to detect objects through fog or smoke. 

“We were not seeing increases in swerving, hard stops, or other examples of factors that create uncomfortable rides,” Miles said. “It means our tech is ready for this next challenge.”

Robotics Summit (May 10-11) returns to Boston

Register Today

The company is rolling out three upgrades to its IONIQ 5 robotaxis, the first is night driving. The update also includes the robotaxis now being connected to a Remote Vehicle Assistance (RVA) system which will help Motional’s autonomous vehicles (AVs) make difficult decisions on the road. 

“As advanced as these vehicles are, and as many scenarios, as they can handle, they will undoubtedly find themselves in some driving situation they’ve never experienced before,” Greg Butron, a Motional principal engineer, said. “RVA helps vehicles navigate complex conditions and continue their journey safely.”

The last update that Motional released will allow passengers to control certain functions with their ride-hail app. These include unlocking the vehicle, contacting customer service and controlling the vehicle’s climate control system. On some rides, passengers will be able to preset the cabin temperate and adjust fan speed before they’re picked up by the robotaxi. 

In November 2022, Motional and Lyft launched an autonomous ride-hailing service in Los Angeles. According to Lyft’s research, Californians are more interested in AVs than the rest of the country. This was part of the reason why the companies picked LA as their second city for AV operations. 

The post Motional to start nighttime robotaxi rides in Las Vegas appeared first on The Robot Report.

US Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy addresses the crowd during the opening session of the World Ag Expo 2023. | Credit: The Robot Report

Speaker McCarthy is a native of nearby Bakersfield and Tulare is in the district that he represents. The speaker along with several other senators and representatives from other ag-heavy states were present on day one of the show for an important “listening session” related to the upcoming farm bill which is up for renewal this spring in the US Congress.

Tevel Aerobotics

The new Tevel Alphabot is a partnership between Tevel Aerobotics and S&S Harvesting. | Credit: The Robot Report

Tevel Aerobotics is the 2021 recipient of an RBR50 innovation award for fruit-collecting drones. Tevel’s major announcement at the 2023 World Ag Expo (WAE) is a new relationship with S&S Metal Fabrication to produce an automated platform harvester to support the Tevel drones as they move down a row.

The new S&S mobile base is a derivative of the existing S&S Alpha-1 platform harvester and is about 8 ft wide and 25 ft long. The vehicle features a soft conveyor belt in the middle of the vehicle to gently move the fruit to storage bins that accumulate and deposit the fruit into larger bins. These bins are then dropped off within the rox behind the autonomous vehicle as it progresses down a row within the orchard. 

Many observers of the initial Tevel fruit-picking demo last year pointed out that the drones were dropping the harvested fruit from too high and that it would likely damage the fruit. Tevel has solved this problem through the implementation of a canvas drop zone that catches the fruit deposited by a drone and then lets the fruit fall a short, repeatable distance to the conveyor.

Agtonomy

Agtonomy launched its new Tele-Farmer solution at World Ag Expo 2023. | Credit: The Robot Report

Agtonomy launched its new Tele-farmer solution at the 2023 WAE show. 

This was the biggest robotic agriculture new product announcement at the show. Agtonomy is a startup headquartered in South San Francisco.

The Tele-Farmer solution is positioned as a farm management software solution BUT the company demonstrated a fleet of what they’re describing as reference tractors automated by their Tele-Farmer software solution.

The solution is primarily targeted at high-value crops and orchard workflows like mowing, spraying, and weeding.

Tele-Farmer features two novel capabilities:

• Trunk Vision is an ai-based vision model designed to track the trunks of trees and navigate accurately through an orchard row.
• An autonomous battery changing feature that can autonomously place a dead battery onto the charger and then pick up a fully charged battery from a nearby charging dock.

Nexus Robotics

The Nexus Robotics weeder employs delta-style robot arms to selectively pull weeds out of the ground, while leaving the crop plants untouched. | Credit: The Robot Report

Canadian robotics company NEXUS Robotics attended the show for the first time. The company has a fully autonomous, unmanned, electric drive platform that features three delta-style robots located underneath the robot chassis to pick weeds from plant rows. Each delta robot arm has a single gripper designed to quickly pluck a weed plant from the soil.

The system uses images from a color camera and artificial intelligence to identify the plants from weeds, and then move the robot’s gripper to the location of the weed while the autonomous platform continues to drive along the row.

Nexus is targeting the lettuce market as the initial application for weeding and thinning during cultivation. The solution is delivered as a robot as a service solution. 

The company plans to have its first vehicles in the field this spring for the weeding and cultivation processes during the growing season.

Farmwise

The new Farmwise Vulcan is an autonomous weeder configured as a smart implement that can be attached to any standard tractor. | Credit: The Robot Report

Farmwise launched the new Vulcan smart implement at the show. Vulcan is completely re-engineered and leverages everything that Farmwise learned from several years of running the Titan, an autonomous weeding solution for clients in the Salinas Valley area of California.

The company plans to continue running its existing Titan-based fleet, but is not planning to expand this service.

The first advantage of the new Vulcan implement is that it is available in a three-row width, which immediately makes it three times faster and more efficient than the Titan. Secondly, Vulcan can be deployed behind any existing manual tractor, which opens up the market for Farmwise. Vulcan could also be deployed behind any of the autonomous tractors currently on the market, matching (or exceeding) the capabilities of the Titan. The result is a win-win for both farmers and Farmwise.

The device uses machine vision and artificial intelligence to identify crop plants from weeds and beneficials, and all of the AI models created with Titan can be leveraged to run Vulcan.

Finally, Vulcan uses hydraulics to actuate the weeding blades whereas Titan used pneumatics to actuate the blades. This provides more speed, precision and stiffness to the blade motion.

Vulcan is simple to operate as users only need to select the crop and row spacing, and then drive down the furrows. Vulcan does the rest. Farmwise technicians remotely monitor the operation and can quickly handle any alerts or errors that might come up during operations.

NOTE: Thomas Palomares, CTO & Co-Founder at FarmWise will present a use case at the upcoming 2023 Robotics Summit and Expo in Boston, MA on May 10-11 2023.

Monarch Tractor

The new Wingspan.ai software from Monarch Tractor is both a fleet manager and a tractor data management application. | Credit: The Robot Report

I have been covering Monarch Tractor since the company emerged from stealth in 2020. At the World Ag Expo last year, the company was featured only at partner booths. However, this year, Monarch Tractor had a booth and demo area that was bigger than John Deere or any of the other “veteran” tractor companies at the show. The company has raised over $80M in the last two years and began shipping its first production units in November of 2022. The company also signed a deal with Foxconn to start manufacturing the tractor in its Lordstown OH manufacturing facility.

So it should be no surprise that the company made such a huge investment in marketing for this event. The company is now making revenue and has a deep backlog of customers ready to buy and deploy the tractors. Every marketing dollar spent can be justified with a potential sale.

At the show, Monarch introduced a new fleet management software package called Wingspan.ai. Wingspan includes a new user interface and a feature set that simplifies the deployment, management, and maintenance of the tractors deployed on a farm. The company fully expects some customers to deploy more than one tractor, so fleet management features are key to controlling the day-to-day operations of the tractors.

Monarch is an open-source data platform and the company plans to make all of the information available about the Monarch tractor operations.

CEO Praveen Penmentsa has a vision where all of this tractor operational information flows upward and is consolidated for the farmer.

Carbon Robotics

Carbon Robotics created an autonomous weeder that uses lasers to zap the weeds and instantly kill them without any dangerous chemicals. In many ways, it’s the ideal solution for managing weeds without disturbing the soil or introducing harmful chemicals that might impact humans, animals, and pollinators.

There were no big announcements from Carbon Robotics this year other than the addition of new crops to the solution. This means that they have new vision identification models for new crops that expand the application for additional crops.

Most notably this year at the show, there was no autonomous version of the Carbon Robotics solution on display. The company is now all in on the smart implement version of its laser-wielding weeder. Both Carbon Robotics and Farmwise have arrived at the same conclusion: single-row autonomous platform cultivation solutions are not as economically viable as a multi-row, smart-implement version of the solution. It’s simple math, when you can cover three times the area in one pass, you can do the work three times faster. This is just the start of the smart-implement market.

The company also introduced an on-tractor power generator for the smart implement that provides onboard power for the unit using the PTO on the tractor.

Farm-NG

Farm-NG provides a variety of configurable components that can be put together to create any number of different style autonomous vehicles for the farm. | Credit: The Robot Report

Farm-NG is an Ag-robotics startup that launched its solutions at this show. The product is an industrial erector set-like platform with open-source software for the development of custom, autonomous farm machines. The Farm-NG product line includes a number of motors, linear actuators, sensors, cameras and a central control unit, all of which are plug-and-play over the CAN bus. It also includes ag-specific attachments such as discs, furrows, blades, tines, a seeding assembly, an integrated compost spreader, and a bunch of other miscellaneous components.

The genius of the system is its modularity and openness. Farmers are tinkerers, and this is the perfect toolkit for any small to medium-sized farming operation. The software included with the onboard controller is designed to be completely programmable through the touchscreen interface. This enables control over the various motors and attachments. However, the system is also completely open, and a programmer can extend the capabilities and write complex, vision or sensor-guided control algorithms. The system also enables secure, remote monitoring and remote teleoperation of the rig through either a WiFi or cellular network.

Bluewhite Robotics

This John Deere tractor has been converted into an autonomous tractor with Bluewhite autonomy package. | Credit: The Robot Report

Bluewhite is an Israeli startup that can automate any existing tractor with the addition of a sensor package and control actuators. The business model for BlueWhite is to work with the existing fleet of tractors that are owned by a farmer and add on the controls that convert the fleet into fully autonomous vehicles, while still preserving the manual drive capabilities of the vehicle.

The company has already converted a number of tractor models from the leading tractor manufacturers. They design custom actuators for steering, throttle, brakes, transmission, etc, that can be retrofitted onto the vehicles. As the company engineers these actuators for a new model, it is building a portfolio of controls that it can leverage for subsequent customers.

The company has a software package that enables remote monitoring and teleoperation of the solution. The software does rely on GPS, RTK or Comms for successful operation. Smart implements are also controllable providing autonomous operations from seed to harvest. 

Bluewhite operates a robot as a service (RaaS) model that enables farmers to operate the equipment locally while Bluewhite monitors the operation continually and handles exceptions and errors to preserve uptime and continuity.

Amos Power

Amos Power launched its new all-electric autonomous tractor. | Credit: The Robot Report

Amos Power is another startup that launched its autonomous tractor at the 2023 WAE. The company is building a completely autonomous, all-electric, tracked tractor. The platform features three separate electric motors, one for each drive train and a separate electrically driven PTO. This enables the PTO to run at a speed and power setting that is different from the drive train of the tractor.

The Amos Power tractor is fully autonomous and does not include a driver’s seat or any way for a farmer to ride in the vehicle. This is different from many of the other competitors and puts Amos Power into the unmanned autonomy segment of the market.

The tractor weighs 2500 kg (6600 lbs) and has a drawbar horsepower of 75-85 hp. The PTO has 34-40 hp. The company is currently taking reservations for its production generation of vehicles.

Guardian Agriculture

Guardian Ag launched its autonomous, unmanned crop-spraying drone. | Credit: The Robot Report

Guardian Agriculture was one of the few aerial unmanned solutions on display at the show. The Guardian SC-1 is a four-prop drone that features 1.5 m (60-inch) propellers and a 76 Liter (20 gal) payload. The vehicle is designed for autonomous aerial spraying operations and is designed to be operated by a single operator who is managing flight operations and the refilling station. The SC-1 would typically fly for 3-4 minutes before emptying its onboard tank and returning to the refill/recharge station. A quick five-minute refill/recharge puts the drone back into the air for continuous operations until all tasks are completed.

The company is currently developing a larger version of the platform that will feature 2 m (80-inch) props and a large capacity tank to extend flight capabilities.

Operators are required to acquire all of the appropriate drone flight and chemical handling certifications before operating the drone.

Beewise

Beewise is innovating the beekeeping industry with a fully autonomous beehive that provides real-time data on bee health and activity. | Credit: The Robot Report

One of the most unique autonomous innovations on display at the show was the Beewise beehome. This is a climate-controlled, solar-powered, remotely monitored beehive with a capacity of up to 24 different hives. The base unit measures 2.5m x 2m x 2m (8 feet x 6.5 feet x 6.5 feet), and weighs less than a ton without the colonies inside.

In addition to monitoring the bee hives and alerting the hive owner to the health of the bees, the unit also features an internal robot that autonomously harvests honey. The robot extracts the individual honeycombs from a hive, gently swiping the bees from the frame during the extraction process. The robot then inserts the frame into an extraction unit that spins the frame at high speed to extract the honey. The frames are then returned to the hive.

The hive operators also received real-time alerts tracking bee movements and other alert conditions.

Vinergy Inc

Vinergy developed an AMR for moving grape boxes from the crop row to the in-field pack-out station so that grape harvesters do not need to leave the row. | Credit: The Robot Report

Vinergy Inc is an experienced machine builder that is expanding it product portfolio to include automation for grape farmers. The company introduced the Gopher IQ autonomous tray mover to support the table grape harvesting process by moving filled boxes of grapes from the in-field rows to a central in-field packing station. This use case keeps the harvesting crew from having to leave their in-row location to deliver the filled boxes to the packing stations, typically a time-wasted operation for the harvesters. Due to the fragility of the crop, table grapes need to be harvested by hand.

The system is provided with a robots-as-a-service (RaaS) business model. The Gopher HQ solution is a manual pack-out station for grape harvesting that provides a mobile packing station structure that can be easily moved anywhere in the field. It includes eight pack out stations, combined with an automated outfeed belt that queues cases of product. The HQ folds down and is designed to trailer up to three Gopher iQ units for transport on the road. The solution is available for deployment during the 2023 harvest season.

The company is also producing the Rhino, a new solution designed for the dairy feeding application. The Rhino is designed to operate in a dairy barn and push the cow feedback within reach of the herd as they feed.

The company also recently secured a grant to work with aerial drone vendor Tevel to provide a ground-based platform to move the battery pack for the harvesting drones, while also providing the structure for gathering fruit. The prototype unit is a much smaller scale than the S&S base unit shown elsewhere at the show, and it was optimized for safely packing stone fruit (peaches, apricots) that are more fragile than apples.

Burro

Burro launched a new autonomous charging station for the Burro AMR. | Credit: The Robot Report

Burro had a number of autonomous units on display at the show. The company is expanding operations with new scouting payload features. CEO Charlie Andersen describes the new security patrol feature as an opportunity for current (and future) Burro operators to extend the usage of their Burro mobile robots after the working day. Unfortunately, farmers are often the target of thieves during the overnight hours, when valuable crops and/or equipment are stolen. By deploying Burros equipped with additional cameras and sensors to patrol remote areas of the farm, farmers can feel more secure that they will be alerted to issues.

The company has also released a new charging station that enables Burros to autonomously recharge the battery without the need for manual plug-in or battery swap. This also supports the security patrol workflow by enabling the vehicles to charge themselves during overnight hours.

Pollination is another task that Burro is pursuing. Burro has started a partnership with Bloomx.ai to deploy a blueberry pollinating payload to the burro and have the vehicle autonomously traverse a field. Pollination for blueberries occurs by shaking the branches and moving the pollen from the male to the female flowers.

Finally, the company is pursuing the solar market including mowing weeds throughout a solar installation, as well as autonomously shuttling solar panels for workers during an install.

Naio Technologies

Naio Technologies demonstrated its complete lineup of autonomous tractors designed for specific crops. | Credit: The Robot Report

Naio Technologies had demo units on display for each of the various autonomous tractors in its portfolio. From the tiny Oz robot to the much larger Orio and Ted platforms. Naio has an established base of users in its native France, and the company is now expanding operations to the USA. The company focuses primarily on weeding and spraying operations in vegetable crops and especially in grapes and vineyards. All of the vehicles in the Naio lineup are unmanned autonomous vehicles and the Orio and Ted platforms carry the implement between the wheel base, which simplifies the safety requirements and the overall driving and control of the vehicle.

GUSS Agriculture

GUSS Agriculture launched a new ground sprayer attachment for the standard and mini GUSS sprayer base units. This attachment turns the GUSS vehicle from an aerial sprayer for orchard trees into a ground spraying machine that can dispense weed killer on weeds on the ground between the orchard trees. This helps with weed management during the growing season and helps to preserve chemical usage by limiting the overspray onto bare ground. The unit is equipped with downward-facing cameras that only spray when it can see the presence of weeds on the ground.

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A Cruise robotaxi named “Poppy” in San Francisco. | Source: Cruise

Cruise announced today its fully driverless vehicles have traveled over one million miles just 15 months after the company gave its first fully driverless ride. A majority of Cruise’s fully driverless miles were driven in San Francisco, where cruise first rolled out its robotaxis in November 2021. 

Since its start in 2013, Cruise’s strategy has been to automate vehicles in the most difficult driving environments first so that its autonomous driving system could be rolled out to cities that are easier to drive in. 

For Cruise, that meant starting in San Francisco, a notoriously difficult city to drive in. This means that for every driverless mile the company logs in San Francisco, it’s able to gain information about complex driving scenarios that help better its technology. 

“The dense, often chaotic, streets of San Francisco have about 19,000 people per mile and give our fleet mountains of information-rich data to learn from,” Mo Elshenawy, the EVP of engineering at Cruise, said in a release. “For example, stop sign blow-throughs are 46x times more frequent in San Francisco than in suburban areas. And double-parked vehicles and cut-ins are everyday norms of San Francisco traffic—not exceptions.”

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More recently, in December 2022, Cruise announced that it was expanding its driverless operations to Austin and Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. An exciting aspect of this expansion is just how quickly Cruise was able to get autonomous vehicles on the ground in Austin. While it took years for the company to launch its first service in San Francisco, it only took Cruise 90 days to go from absolutely no infrastructure in Austin to beginning to give driverless rides. 

“Every day, we process five petabytes of simulation data—this means we process more than a 4k digital library of every movie ever made every month,” Elshenawy said. “Together, road data and simulated data help us train new AI models that continuously improve upon the performance of older ones.”

Cruise has recently started testing its purpose-built Origin vehicle on public roads in San Francisco. Origin is a fully autonomous vehicle with no front seat or steering wheel, designed specifically for giving autonomous taxi rides. 

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Zoox, an autonomous vehicle company and Amazon subsidiary, has started giving autonomous rides in its purpose-built robotaxis. For now, the rides are available exclusively to Zoox employees between the company’s two main buildings, about a mile-long ride, at its headquarters in Foster City, California. 

The rides began on February 11, 2023, when the company rolled out its Zoox robotaxi for the first time on public roads. The Zoox robotaxi has no steering wheel and no “front seat” and is instead equipped with rows of seating facing each other. Inside the vehicle, riders can control the music and air from touchscreen control panels near the seas, and check their arrival time, location and route whenever they want. 

The rectangular vehicle has four-wheel steering, allowing it to perform precise maneuvers. Because it doesn’t have a driver’s seat, the small vehicle is bidirectional, meaning it can move forward and backward with ease. 

In their current route, the robotaxis can go up to 35 mph. Zoox’s deployment is limited by the permit it earned from the California DMV, but over time as the system undergoes more testing, the company will likely receive approval to do more. 

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“The founding premise of Zoox was that the best way to advance transportation and increase safety on our roadways was to reimagine the full mobility experience. That means going beyond retrofitting today’s passenger vehicles with autonomous technology,” Jesse Levinson, co-founder and chief technology officer at Zoox, said. “It is a feat of design and engineering – and the culmination of years of hard work – to drive a purpose-built vehicle, fully autonomously and without safety drivers. With the ability to operate our vehicle on public roads and the deployment of our employee shuttle service, we’ll continue to refine and improve our technology and operations as we prepare for our commercial service launch.

“Today, with the announcement of the maiden run of our autonomous employee shuttle, we are adding to the progress this industry has seen over the last year and bringing Zoox one step closer to a commercialized purpose-built robotaxi service for the general public,” Zoox’s CEO Aicha Evans said. 

Zoox has spent months perfecting its autonomous driving software using its recently upgraded testing fleet. With such a uniquely designed vehicle, that can never be operated with a safety driver behind the wheel, Zoox’s testing fleet had to be precisely designed so that the autonomous driving knowledge it gains can be translated onto its public-facing vehicles. 

Zoox isn’t the only company working to put a custom-made autonomous vehicle on the road. Earlier this month, Cruise started testing its Origin vehicle, also made with no steering wheel, on public roads. 

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Zoox’s upgraded L3 testing vehicle. | Source: Zoox

Since its founding eight years ago, Zoox, a company developing autonomous vehicles (AVs) and now a subsidiary of Amazon, has been working towards its goal of creating a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, with no steering wheel. 

While the company isn’t the only AV developer with this goal, Cruise, for example, just started testing its Origin vehicle, which has no steering wheel, it is taking a unique approach to rolling out those vehicles. Zoox has an extensive, recently upgraded testing fleet that is verifying the effectiveness of its autonomous driving technology. This fleet is at work in a few cities, including Seattle, San Francisco and Las Vegas. 

“We’ve always wanted to have a service to give you a better ride from A to B, initially focused on dense urban areas,” Zoox’s Director of Studio Engineering Chris Stoffel told The Robot Report. “And in order to do that it requires, we believe, a ground-up product.”

Zoox’s testing fleet isn’t open to the public, and the company doesn’t plan for it to ever be. The fleet solely exists to perfect the company’s driving software before it is rolled out for the public in the company’s purpose-built autonomous vehicle.

“This vehicle is out there to really develop our self-driving technology, to map new locations, and to really ensure that the hardware and software we’re using to self-drive is ready for public groups to view when we bring out our full self-driving vehicle,” Zoox’s Director of Studio Engineering Chris Stoffel told The Robot Report. 

This vehicle looks more like a train car than the cars we see on the road now. It has no steering wheel, and no “front seat”, and is instead equipped with rows of seating facing each other. Inside these vehicles, riders can control the music and air from touchscreen control panels near the seats, and check their arrival time, location, and route whenever they want. 

The rectangular vehicle has four-wheel steering, giving it the ability to perform precise maneuvers. Because it doesn’t have a driver’s seat, the small vehicle is bidirectional, meaning it can move forward and backward with ease. 

With such a uniquely designed vehicle, that can never be operated with a safety driver behind the wheel, Zoox’s testing fleet had to be precisely designed so that the autonomous driving knowledge it gains can be translated onto Zoox’s public-facing vehicles. 

Upgrades to Zoox’s testing fleet

With Zoox’s purpose-built AV’s hardware production ready, and the company conducting ongoing testing of the vehicle in a closed testing area, Zoox is working on finalizing its self-driving technology to ensure its vehicle will be ready to hit the roads. 

“We’re developing a technology that we want to make sure we can operate as we want to in those edge cases,” Stoffel said. “And in order to do that, we really want to send those helper vehicles out there with the same technology to validate those scenarios and ensure that if we do face an environment or a scenario where the vehicle needs further development, that we have the right technology and the right set up to be able to do that.” 

Zoox’s newly upgraded fleet is made up of its L3V7 testing vehicle, upgraded Toyota Highlander Hybrids, which the company calls its L3 fleet. The L3 fleet is retrofitted with the same sensors, in the same locations, as Zoox’s purpose-built AV, which it calls its L5 vehicle. Zoox’s sensor pods are located in the four corners of the vehicle, with each pod having a 270º field of view. 

“We’ve basically taken a holistic design approach to updating our L3 vehicles. That exact same hardware that we’re talking about within our self-driving vehicles, which includes our sensor pods, which have three different types of sensors, LiDAR, camera and long-wave infrared, all the sensor cleaning technology, all the production hardware, is now included on our L3 vehicles,” Stoffel said. 

It should be noted, while the titles of Zoox’s vehicles are based on the SAE self-driving vehicle levels, they don’t directly correlate with the 5 SAE levels. While the L5 robotaxi is L5 capable, according to the company, due to the nature of needing to operate within a geofenced location, it technically operates as an L4 vehicle with L5 capability. 

One of the only differences between the sensors in the L3V7 testing vehicles and the L5 is in the placement of the radars, Stoffel said, which are in small black boxes on the outside of the vehicle. These sensors aren’t visible in the L5, but because of the size difference between the two vehicles, they needed to be placed on the outside of the L3V7.

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Like Zoox’s L5 vehicles, the L3V7s are equipped with LUX (light) and VOX (sound) hardware. This hardware is intended to help close the communication gap between autonomous vehicles and human drivers on the road. Using light signals and sounds to communicate with pedestrians and other drivers in ways that autonomous vehicles typically struggle with. 

“Sound is probably predominantly the one we use the most, because it’s a little more universal, it doesn’t matter whether it’s daytime or nighttime,” Stoffel said. “You can imagine someone who may be a distracted pedestrian who’s crossing the street, maybe they’re jaywalking. Instead of just honking a loud horn, which disturbs them, it disturbs the person inside our vehicle and it disturbs everyone outside the vehicle as well, we can design a sound to just get their attention with more like a chirp or a nice sound that isn’t disturbing to everyone else.” 

According to Stoffel, the LUX and VOX hardware allows the vehicle to navigate scenarios like these less awkwardly than previous testing vehicles, while also causing less confusion for other drivers and pedestrians. 

The upgraded L3V7 vehicles are also easier to produce than the previous testing vehicles, as Zoox plans to ramp up testing as the company grows. 

“As we’re growing as a company, we’re going to have more and more of these vehicles. And so we wanted to update the design to manufacture at scale, so that we can produce more of them in a shorter amount of time with more consistency,” Stoffel said. 

While the L3V7 vehicles were designed, overall, to better match Zoox’s L5 vehicles, the L5 vehicles themselves were designed with information gathered from the company’s previous testing fleet. This is how the company has refined its technology and design over the years. 

Zoox also upgraded the look of its latest testing vehicles. While the past ones were typically simple and black, the new vehicles have a much more colorful color palette. Zoox hopes this more recognizable design choice will help the vehicles to stand out as its development vehicles, and help build trust in Zoox vehicles with the public. 

While the company hasn’t given any public details on when it plans for its L5 vehicles to hit the road, the company seems to be pivoting to a more public-facing stage of its development, which means we could be seeing the L5 on roads sooner rather than later. 

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Phantom AI, a Mountain View, California-based developer of an autonomous driving platform, announced it brought in $36.5 million in Series C funding, bringing the company’s total funding to $80.2 million since its start in 2017.

While there are many companies in the autonomous vehicle space, Phantom AI is hoping to set itself apart from others with its unique strategy. The company aims to quickly democratize autonomous driving by advancing ADAS technologies. Phantom AI’s product offerings include a computer vision system called PhantomVision, a sensor fusion called PhantomFusion, and PhantomDrive, a vehicle control system. 

Hyunggi Cho, now the CEO, and Chan Kyu Lee, now the CTO, co-founded the company. The two met while both working at Tesla. They discovered that they had an interest in the possibilities of early ADAS technology and its capacity to bring autonomous technology to market well before fully driverless cars reach the roads.

“This funding validates investor confidence in not only our mission to save lives through innovative visual perception technology but also our ability to execute on this mission,” Cho said in a release. “We’re focused on developing and expanding our product offerings, enhancing our marketing and sales efforts and accelerating our business growth with the goal to give customers the best possible multi-camera vision solutions in the market.” 

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New investors participating in the round included InterVest, Shinhan GIB and Samsung Ventures. The Series C round also included existing investors KT Investment and Renaissance Asset Management. 

“This is a very exciting time for Phantom AI as customers are recognizing the critical role driver-assisted technology plays in making automobiles safer for everyone,” Jay Jinhwan Jeon of InterVest, the lead investor in this round, said in a release. “We’re thrilled to partner with Phantom AI at this time to help bring this important technology to the market.”

Phantom AI plans to use the funding to accelerate its current series production development with major OEMs. Its customers include Tier 1 automotive manufacturers that are interested in integrating lower-level autonomy systems in their vehicles that will deliver full autonomy in the future. 

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