How Autonomy in Ag Could Develop Faster Than Expected

Our team recently caught up with Chris Hunsaker at the FEMA Supply Summit and Showcase. He’s the co-founder of Acuitus Ag, a company providing software-related tools to OEMs and farmers. We asked him for his “crystal ball take” on what autonomy might look like 5 years from now in the ag industry. 

“The use of cameras to be able to see what’s going on — this is another design paradigm — where the idea in the tech world is if you can see it with your eyes, then you can train a computer to see it with a camera. When you think about automating the machines, how is the machine operated now? You have a person in a seat looking at what’s going on, making adjustments to the machine. A few hundred dollars’ worth of cameras and a GPU and some AI models can be trained in a relatively straightforward way to do the same thing. If you need an example of this, go schedule a test drive of a Tesla. Have that car drive itself for you and see what you come away thinking about the whole process because that car is only using cameras and a processor to do that. There’s no radar, there’s no ultrasonic sensors, there’s no hyper-accurate GPS that’s going into that. If that is able to be translated over into ag then I think you get to a spot in autonomy where it comes faster than what you would’ve expected otherwise.”

Hunsaker grew up on a farm and worked in the machinery space for several years before diving into the software world. He shared more perspective and predictions during a technology panel discussion at the conference, which you can read all about on PrecisionFarmingDealer.com.

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