Agricultural applications fuel Indiana's push for autonomous car technology

By Chris O'Malley

Mooresville, Indiana-based manufacturer ET Works offers a $9,000 auto-steering option for its Apache sprayer vehicles. | Photo courtesy of ET Works

Self-driving vehicle technology, like Tesla’s semi-autonomous Autopilot feature, is rolling out like science fiction in suburbia.

But down on the farm, such technology is as dated as a Blackberry.

For years, farmers ordering tractors and other rolling farm conveyances have been able to check the box for auto-steering and auto-sensing options. Those technologies guide tractors, combines and sprayer vehicles using the same global positioning signals that Google uses in its bubble-shaped autonomous car prototypes.

Of course, farms have an advantage in that they’re typically private land – not city streets where mistakes could be costly. As such, they’ve been the perfect proving ground for the technology.

“We’ve actually offered auto-steering for 10 years or so,” said Kevin Covey, general manager of product support at Mooresville, Ind.-based ET Works, which calls itself the largest maker of mechanical drive sprayers in the world.

Larger versions of ET Works’ Apache-brand sprayer vehicles have a chassis resembling that of a monster truck, only with fancy cabs and long sprayer booms. Some weigh 20,300 pounds and sell for more than $300,000. With Cummins engines and ZF transmissions, these are brutes.

Touted for productivity

ET Works may now be the only Indiana-based manufacturer of semi-autonomous vehicles. Indianapolis-based Precise Path Robotics, a self-driving lawn mower company co-founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Jones, was purchased in 2015 by Cleveland-based MTD Products, parent of the Cub Cadet line.

In the case of ET Works, it doesn’t make the brains of the auto-steering devices that can steer the machines through rows without creating crop carnage. ET Works sources GPS-guided auto-steering computers from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Trimble Inc. The technology connects to steering shafts via electrical-hydraulic coupling.

Some farmers shell out $9,000 for the auto-steering option on the Apache vehicles to reduce the fatigue of driving precisely through fields for hours on end. They also buy it because precise auto-steering can reduce the odds of wasting chemical by overlapping other rows.

The technology has its limits, however. The operator must first drive the boundary line of the field so the computer can learn the line. It then steers by itself, but only up until the end of a row, where the driver takes over and lines it up for the next pass.

Current models don’t have auto-sensing technology that reacts to rocks or holes in the field.

“You have to steer around those yourself,” Covey said of the current offering.

Other farm equipment manufacturers, most notably John Deere, also offer such systems, including Deere’s AutoTrac system that will steer through turns.

And last August, Case IH rolled out a prototype of a driverless tractor that looks like something out of a Terminator movie. The cab-less tractor uses light detection and ranging technology as well as radar and GPS to find its way around the farm.

Large farms such as Leesburg, Ind.-based Tom Farms have been using auto-steering Deere tractors for years as part of a broader adaption of technology to improve productivity.

Applications aplenty

Indiana hasn’t played as much a role in cultivating autonomous technology as much as it has applied the technology in the proverbial field.

One exception is automotive supplier Delphi. Its Kokomo, Indiana operation helped develop radar and vision sensors for future vehicle automation products. For example, some of Delphi’s Kokomo team helped equip and test an Audi that drove across the country autonomously two years ago.

More recently, the Kokomo team worked with Delphi engineers in California and Pennsylvania on a new automated system demonstrated at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, said Delphi spokesman Zach Peterson.

Still, it may be in the realm of finding applications of this evolving technology where Indiana sees the most activity.

About two years ago, Indianapolis applied for a $40 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s “Smart City Challenge” competition to demonstrate technology that could relieve transportation congestion.

Indianapolis-based initiative Energy Systems Network proposed partially or fully autonomous shuttle busses. ESN also proposed working with Delphi on converting some of the vehicles in the electric car-sharing program BlueIndy to autonomous use.

Indianapolis didn’t land the DOT grant, but such ideas still have potential in future projects, said Melissa Roberts, spokeswoman for ESN.

Self-driving semis

Some Indiana visionaries see even bolder applications.

Jamie Bass, CEO of Evansville-based security and engineering firm Gravicom, wants to apply automation to tractor trailers, in a concept known as AutoTruckbot.com.

Tractor-trailers without drivers would autonomously maneuver interstates. They’d arrive at a truck yard and uncouple the trailer. A human-piloted truck would take the trailer to its final destination in a nearby city.

Such an arrangement would allow drivers to spend more time with their families and could potentially speed deliveries because the autonomous truck wouldn’t need to stop or take federally mandated sleep breaks, like a human driver.

Bass has taken his proposal to various conferences and attempted to interest investors but to no avail. Though there have been demonstrations of self-driving semis, the technology is still not mature. And perhaps more insurmountable are legal and safety issues.

Bass said without a few hundred million dollars to lobby in Washington, D.C., and without a consortium behind him, the concept will probably be taken up by a huge company with deep pockets.

“If I were to take a guess, I’d say it would be Amazon because they are experts at building out logistics systems and big data systems,” he said.