MENDON – After two-and-a-half decades of turning large vehicles into self-driving masterpieces, Autonomous Solutions, Inc made great inroads in the farming industry. The Cache Valley company recently launched the largest commercial use of autonomous tractors in the sugar industry.
U.S. Sugar is an industry leader in sugar production, and they just signed a deal to us ASI’s technology to deploy a fleet of unmanned John Deere tractors across its 255,000 acres of farmland in South Florida.
Four John Deere 8R Series tractors and one John Deere 9R Series tractor fitted with Autonomous Solution’s technology will be operating in sugarcane fields 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The tractors, which are traditionally manually operated, are fitted with Mobius®, ASI’s autonomous fleet management system. The fleet can operate autonomously with oversight from a central command station, where a single operator will oversee multiple vehicles at once.
“U.S. Sugar has always believed that combining innovation with hard work is the best way to keep feeding American families,” said Ken McDuffie, president and CEO of U.S. Sugar. “By leveraging American technology to increase efficiency and maximize productivity, we are also increasing reliability in our domestic food supply while creating new, higher-skilled opportunities for our employees.”
The autonomous tractors deliver improved accuracy, higher production, enhanced sustainability and increased reliability in land preparation. ASI technology was piloted on U.S. Sugar’s farmlands during an 18-month research and development phase.
U.S. Sugar will retain every current employee by retraining tractor drivers to fill other roles across the operation. The Company is committed to hiring employees for the knowledge-based skills this state-of-the-art technology requires.
U.S. Sugar selected ASI, because they are a leader in industrial off-road vehicle automation, they develop, test and customize the autonomous system to U.S. Sugar’s operations. ASI partners with various commercial industries, including logistics, heavy construction and landscaping to enhance efficiency, safety and workforce productivity. ASI’s solution integrates with the tractors’ existing drive-by-wire system, turning familiar John Deere platforms into fully autonomous workhorses capable of continuous, precise operation.
“At ASI, our mission is to help you reach your potential through innovative robotic solutions, and U.S. Sugar is a powerful example of that mission in action,” said ASI CEO Mel Torrie in a statement. “This deployment demonstrates that autonomy is not a futuristic concept. It is a practical, scalable tool that helps American farmers do more with less, improve safety in the field and keep pace with global demand.”
U.S. Sugar is leveraging this autonomous technology on state-of-the-art tractors purchased from a company headquartered in Florida and known for its expertise in large scale farming machinery.
Over the next decade, the technology will be deployed across U.S. Sugar’s 255,000 acres of farmland, which is roughly 375 square miles, equivalent to 182,000 football fields or more than 10 times the size of Miami. The technology is currently used for sugarcane land preparation and cultivation, and the company intends to expand the technology for other types of farming, including sweet corn and green bean land preparation and cultivation in the future.
ASI developed the Mobius® autonomous fleet management system and became a worldwide leader in industrial vehicle automation. They work with Fortune 500 companies across various sectors, such as heavy construction, agriculture, logistics, and landscaping all over the world.
ASI has developed a system that transforms the dirty, dull, and dangerous into efficient, scalable, accurate, and reliably productive operations.
Twenty-six years ago a group of engineers took technologies developed at Utah State University into the commercial sector. Since then, ASI has grown to become one of the largest privately held robotics-focused companies anywhere and continues to rapidly scale. Homebase is ASI’s 150-acre proving ground in Petersboro.