Autonomy A Conversation with Raven Industries' Paul Welbig
By Jackie Pucci, Senior Editor, CropLife and Agribusiness Global
Autonomy — a concept that would have seemed like science fiction in the past— is one of the baseline premises of many of the strategic developments in agricultural technology today. We sat down with Paul Welbig, Director of Sales for Slingshot and Strategic Accounts for Raven Industries to chat on the present and the future of autonomous solutions in agriculture.
We are in a supervised autonomy state today — we’re not just pushing a button and the robot goes and does its thing. We’re more about supervised autonomy, where you’re in the field supervising the whole operation. That allows the operator to still intervene and make some adjustments if necessary.
Where we’re seeing a lot of interest, is where you can run it in tandem with another machine in the field — a traditional floater, sprayer, or tractor, where there’s a driver in the cab and they could be the one supervising the autonomous machine. The benefit is you’re still supervising but you’re doubling your productivity because you’re two machines with one operator. You could call it a leader-follower type of scenario. That could apply to spreading, spraying, and tillage through that same practice.
We often talk about the path to autonomy. We divided it up into levels — one through five — with one being very little automation, and level five being fully autonomous. Supervised autonomy is level four; we think there’s still a lot of room in levels three and four. You could put an inexperienced operator in these very sophisticated machines and if a lot of the technology is enabling the automation, you don’t have to have a fully trained and experienced operator, which are harder and harder to come by. That’s part of the value proposition: Let’s not try to skip ahead to level five; let’s try to back it up a little bit.
As it relates to replacing jobs, the fact of the matter is the labor is scarce today. The challenges are real. I just spoke to a couple ag retailers just last week. We’re in constant communication with our customers, and they are 12 operators down — and it’s April 13th. It’s the busy season. They’re already short-staffed. Trying to refill those positions has been harder every single year. It’s not just the machines these customers are short; it’s the supporting staff and truck drivers that are necessary to make the whole operation work. I contend that we’re just trying to complement and boost productivity with the staff you have or re-allocate the staff you have to do these tasks that might have traditionally been filled with a different level or type of staff.
Operating in a more autonomous world does introduce new challenges. Once you step into that arena, you realize how many decisions are made by the driver in the cab or the associated staff. You can’t completely overcome some of those decisions with a computer. You have to work through different scenarios and try to overcome them. That’s what our engineering teams are working on — to continuously improve the software and learn.
We can use buzzwords like AI and machine learning, but it’s really about decision making. You can have a best-laid plan, but as real-world situations get introduced, how does it react? Obstacle avoidance, detection, and, obviously, safety are paramount. But you can still be efficient as you would if there was more of a traditional piece of equipment. That’s why with running in tandem, or the buddy system if you will, where you’ve got a machine in the field with a driver and an autonomous machine without, you are increasing your productivity. There’s a learning curve there.
Transport between fields is something that often gets asked about. It’s great for autonomy within the field, but as far as how do I move from field to field, that’s also something that’s a little bit different. You may have to trail it; you may have to tow it.
Embedded in these solutions, accuracy is still paramount. Precision is still paramount. It’s often overlooked or taken for granted that — let’s not forget we have precision agriculture. We can’t overlook that; we can’t get sloppy for the sake of autonomy. It has to be a value-add on top of precision agriculture. We’ve done precision ag and controls throughout our entire 45-year history as a company at Raven, so that’s near and dear to our hearts. You don’t want to overapply any products in areas that don’t need it.
Obviously with rising input costs and the margin pressure on yield and all the things that go into it, that has to be a mainstay and autonomy can only enhance that capability. It’s fundamental, and our customers have continuously given us feedback that, with the implements we have on the spreader and sprayer, and leveraging the full Raven technology stack, they’re finding it’s as accurate if not more accurate than some of the older equipment in their fleet.
The driverless machine that’s run by computer somehow magically every time hits exactly perfect, as far as the amount of product delivered. It goes back to section control, the turns, being very precise with the path that it’s driving to the field — all those things stack up to a highly accurate solution. That carries back to your product, input costs, as well as fuel efficiency. These machines are more efficient. There is no cab with an air conditioner and other creature comforts, as well as the sheer weight of it is lower. We can get a little bit more out of 200 hp machine than you might otherwise get from a 300 hp that’s loaded up with all these other features.
I’ve been in agriculture all my life. I was a farm kid and have an agronomy degree. I worked as an agronomist as a coop and have always been involved in precision ag from my early days until now. I’ve been with Raven for 20 years. If I rewind the clock 20 years, we were talking about autosteer and using GPS and what if we could automate that process in the tractor. That was a huge leap in technology back then. Here we are 20 years later and we’re talking about removing the operator from the cab altogether and we have all these things that we’re doing with it along the way.
To me, it just encapsulates and caps off this whole 20-year journey where we’re taking all these technologies — connectivity, data, precision ag controls on the machinery to a driverless state – that’s pretty exciting. What could be possible in the next 20-year journey? We’re talking about drones and other types of machines and sensors. The sky is the limit as far as where we could go with all this. Traceability and sustainability could be very complementary and supported through all of these technologies.
I can’t imagine where we’ll be in 20 years if I just look back to the previous 20 years. That will be a really exciting place to be. For those that are considering being in agriculture, I would strongly recommend it. Now’s the time, because we need to continuously feed the world and there are a lot of aspects to it that are exciting, and we need you.
