Why Artificial Intelligence (AI) will not create robot tractors

Twenty years ago DARPA who sponsor advanced research in the USA ran a competition to develop a vehicle to save lives of the US military. This was hoped to lead to autonomous vehicles. This excellent book takes us through the exciting developments of the past 20 years of sensors and systems but we still have no autonomous vehicles on public roads. Exciting, and initially tech driven, the competitions in the Mojave desert are particularly well described. The first failed to find a vehicle that could complete the course but two years later several vehicles managed the 150 miles of rugged terrain. The action then moves to the even more dynamic environment of urban driving and the businesses that were created and failed to deliver a safe system to replace the human skill of driving. There is so much in this book of interest to engineers, drivers, business people and investors still looking for the secret sauce that will bring sensory intelligence to robots. Things that humans do with ease are difficult for robots and vice versa. This is Moravecs paradox explored with billions of dollars of investment money from Google, Uber, Ford, GM et al. and still there are no autonomous vehicles regularly on the road.

For me, with a Defra funded innovation project to develop safe working systems to stop tractors killing humans and animals this is a key text. The book maps out the development process that failed to constrain the operational design domain and demonstrates the hubris of some inventors one of whom ended up in prison for IP theft. The desire for a complete system prevented the development of the aftermarket of conversions of existing vehicles that could evolve autonomy. Whilst deep learning techniques of showing many tagged pictures of cats to a computer can teach it to recognise a cat, this has proved insufficient to learn the complexities of navigating a road without accidents.

For me this is welcome. I am disappointed with the displays of robotic tractor systems and there are many now appearing, they seem to have to have a narrow focus and few farms are big enough for a single purpose machine.

I want to keep the flexibility of the existing tractor fleet and provide a conversion kit that allows them to be used in many tasks, anything from feeding animals on a frosty morning or carrying tools and posts while fencing. I have defined a few problems where humans work with tractors and spend a lot of time jumping on an off and driving short distances.

#tractor #robot #farming #defra #innovateUK #horticulture #robothayes