In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Helen Greiner, who is the CEO at Tertill; Tertill makes a small solar powered weeding robot for vegetable gardens. The conversation begins with an overview of Helen's previous robotics experience, including at as a student at MIT, co-founder at iRobot, founder and CEO at CyPhyWorks, and in advising government research in robotics, AI, and machine learning. From there, Helen explains the design of the Tertill robot, how it works, and her high hopes for this simple robot: to help reduce the environmental impact of the agriculture industry by helping people to grow their own food. In the last part of the conversation, Helen speaks broadly about her experience in robotics startups, the robotics industry, and the future of robotics.

Start

Introducing Helen

Roomba’s backstory

CyPhyWorks

Helping special forces with your robots

Advising robotics and AI research investments

Introducing Tertill

Lessons learned from the Roomba

Challenges in making Tertill

Why make a weeding robot?

On gardening

Helen’s path

Matching the market and technology

Where and how to get information on opportunities

Advice for starting a robotics company

Different types of investment

B-to-B or B-to-C (Business to business or business to consumer) markets

Robotics consumer space

Future of robotics

Importance of robotics in the big picture

This is a conversation with Helen Greiner, who is the CEO of Tertill. Tertill makes a solar powered robot wieder for home vegetable gardens. And you see this Tertill robot, you might think of the robot vacuum cleaner the Roomba by iRobot. This comparison makes sense. And funny enough, they were both made by some of the same people, Helen included. What I think is beautiful about the Roomba, and this robot the Tertill is that it is so relatively simple, yet provides real value. Vacuuming under the bed is a pain. And I don't have much experience with weeding, but weeding sounds awful. And both of these products are for the consumer market, meaning that they have to be inexpensive enough that many people can afford them. The iRobot Roomba was one of the first successful consumer robots, and it grew the consumer robotics space, which benefited all of us in robotics, from making investment easier to come by to parts being cheaper to showing people that robots aren't all Terminator robots. As Helen says before this interview, and has been said before on this podcast, a rising tide lifts all boats. I look forward to seeing how the Tertill does in the future. And if I start a garden, I'll probably get one. I'm Audrow Nash. This is the sense think act podcast. If you like this interview, please consider subscribing. A big thank you to our founding sponsor open robotics. And now, here's my interview with Helen Greiner. Would you introduce yourself? Hi, I'm

Helen gainer. And I'm a robot enthusiast.

Now, we're gonna be talking mostly about Tertill. But I'd love to start, like for context to talk about your whole path in robotics.

You want to just tell me like, I mean, maybe at a high level from grad school, and then you were involved with iRobot?

Well, it started back when I was 11. And I saw Star Wars and fell in love with auto detail and odd to think, you know, he wasn't just a machine, right? He was a character. He had an agenda. He saved the universe. He had a personality, a lot of expression with his bleeps and bloops. And, you know, since that time, I've always wanted to make things that are more than machines. And so I went to MIT to learn how. And it turns out, I learned a lot of great engineering there, but they didn't really know how to build robots for the real world. And so right after grad school, I was in grad school at MIT, in computer science, although my undergraduates mechanical and accepted to the Ph. D. program, but instead decided to cofound iRobot corporation with vide books and Cullen angle.

And then, so you will What did you do at iRobot? So you were designing the robot I believe. Original vacuum cleaner robots.

Now, way back when way back when, when the company first found it. All of us myself lied and con, we're actually designing the robots and building them and fabricating them and everything about the robots. But though, you know, we started iRobot in 1990. It wasn't until, like, 98, we started seriously working on the Roomba and not until 2002. We put it on the market. So there's a lot of history before that. Oh, we are, you know, the longest overnight success. People hadn't heard about us until the bomba. But you know, there's a whole lot of robots that we were building. Before eventually military

robots for so many different industries. We did a robot for oil and gas industry doing downhole inspections, plug patch perforate stuff. We had robots that large cleaning robots, we had robots that were in a museum that was robots that we sold to research labs. We get a toy robot, a baby doll robot with Hasbro. Just so many different robots. But it wasn't until we put robots on the market under our brand that we were you know that we had any success.

Interesting. So it was was it kind of like you were contracts Acting around like people would want robots or you'd see it opportunities.

Yeah, it was it was kind of like any robot for money usually would get the large company to bring the dollars. And you know, we, I, we believe the marketing and the the market savvy, and we were doing the technology and the creativity and the innovation and the robots. And you know, it sounds good on paper. But what usually happened was the industries work at glacial paces. And the person who was advocate either move to another position or another company, and then you almost had to start the sales pitch, again, from the or from the beginning. Yeah. So I don't think we had enough top level buy in at the companies to make it successful. And in some cases, the robot technology was competing with the status quo of how the the existing product lines. So you know, a larger company wouldn't have that much incentive to, you know, push it forward.

Interesting. And then how did it how did you go towards the Roomba with us

like? Well, let's see, our first employee at iRobot was Joe Jones, Joe had been thinking about some of the things while he was at MIT, and that Maxwell was wide Brooks's behavioral control algorithms, because, you know, we really didn't have a lot of resources to put on these smaller robots. So we couldn't have, you know, the kinds of processing and the kinds of capabilities that some of the robots have today, even the Roomba. So, Joe wrote a white paper in I think, you know, maybe 9097, or 98, saying, you know, hey, we're building these large cleaning lots, we're building all these larger robots. But really, we should do the simplest possible thing first, and he spelled out, small, low bought five point about $200. Needs to be fully automated use the simplest possible senses rather than, you know, the most capable senses. And, you know, get something out there pretty quickly. And we, you know, it sounded like a good idea to everybody. So it was funded with very small amounts of money, because we didn't have a lot of money. And, you know, it kept building prototypes of it, Joe and the team, and they, you know, got, you know, we could never see a reason why it wouldn't work. And we fully expected when we started it to see a reason why there's one component missing, like, it's not a product. Yep. There was another robot vacuum. On the market. We didn't know that much about it at the time, I left on that Sandborn, but it was many 1000s of dollars. Us, it doesn't sound very high tech today, but use Sona technology, but it made it very expensive. And I think that when a new concept is new, it has to be reasonably inexpensive for people to take that jump. So Moonves might sell sometimes for, you know, $1,000 today, but when you're a new company, with a new band in a very new area, it's important that it's, you know, it's a kind of product, you can take your wallet out and say, Oh, I'll take a risk on that.

Yeah, definitely. And there's a lot of people that are willing to do that, because maybe they're way less that are willing to take the risk and like $1,000, robot vacuum cleaner versus a $200. One. Okay, and then where

we got, we got the robot on the market, the, the Roomba, we still doing the robots for the military. And that actually, we got them both on the market in 2002. The robots in the military got moved up because of the war efforts and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and then soon after evac, they probably would have stayed as military research for a while. But there was this Driving driving need for bomb disposal robots, and we were like, they're with the capability that they needed. And at the same time, we put the limbo on the market and you know, starting to get some consumer success. And so these companies never would have had these two disparate areas if one had happened first, right, because all the resources would have been thrown at that one, just because they were successful together. And you know, it really helped us because I can tell you a lot of the investors didn't believe in the consumer robot market until we had it on the market. And it was successful.

Gotcha. So that the investors were or was it like you were funding the efforts with the military robots. And that allowed you to bootstrap the concern?

We were we were paying for infrastructure with the military contracts, because we have large contracts as research contracts as well as having built up, you know, so the infrastructure was being paid for, like, you know, the offices and that we had people on staff to a very capable roboticist because we had the ability to pay for them. But we didn't really raise investment capital until eight years in in 1998. That's when we started. And by 2005, when we took it public, it you know, we'd raised a total of 38 million, which is peanuts today, that's like seeing these, you know, a OB today.

Yeah. Okay. And then you raise the capital, and then that lets you scale so you could grow the consumer market for the room, or the consumer side of the business for the room.

At the same time, though, you know, after we went public, the military side was going strong too. But eventually, after I left in 2008, they did spend the military stuff out into a company called andeavor, which was purchased by FLIR for like over $300 million. And then, that was purchased actually was all purchased by Teledyne. So the technology still exists, the robots don't exist, a lot of the same people are working on them, but it's no longer a robot.

Gotcha. What is your so between 1998 and 2008? Or so when you left? iRobot? What were you primarily involved

in? Everything I was, you know, going on time, I was president chairman, and, you know, everything from sales to media to taking it public and investment. Acquisitions as you know, everything.

Mm hmm. And then how did you decide to go to sci fi work? So that was the next step? Right.

Yeah. Well, I was looking at what next? And, you know, being chairman of a company is kind of the best job actually, what it really is, because it's a gotcha what I was at Iowa, but because you have, you know, you get to do a lot of interesting things. But you're not, you know, you don't have all that operational responsibility. But it's not the best job when you're 40 years old, which is what I was. So I think that I really, when I looked at what I really liked, I liked it when the Roomba and pack bought the military robots, were first being developed the innovation side when you're getting something the likes of which people haven't seen before, after. And so that's why I want to do it again. And I saw that the drone space was the place to do it. And

how did you see it was the space to do it? And what made

it was an untapped market. You know, when I look at drones, it's like, a magic technology that solves a lot of the problem. You know, I think it will guild guild fat who was adopted now at Toyota research, I think he he's the one who first said, The problem with ground robots is to ground all this stuff on the ground, right? Especially when you take it out outdoors, and even indoors with the Roomba. You know, there's a lot of pollen you have to face and a lot of recognition, you know, a lot of knowing what it is and getting around it. And negotiation was a drone, you could just fly right over it. Right? And you know, free space is actually easy.

Yeah. Okay, so you saw that there was potential here because it solves a lot of existing robotics challenges. So you could probably do new and interesting things. But then how sci fi works? And actually, would you kind of speak to the premise of the company?

Well, the Sci Fi works. The idea we had originally was at the time, a little less so now, but at the time, the battery technology wasn't there. So the drones would only run a short amount of time and not enough any real types of military missions or law enforcement missions. So or even, you know, long term communication missions. So we had some technology to make a tethered drone. And we were, you know, the first ones out there with a drone that you could stay stays up in the air for, you know, weeks at a time. So you put it up on a tether, and you put it up to you know, put it up to 300 feet in the air and it just flies all the time. And then you have that station where you can get eyes on something or you can do communications

never I never envisioned that the only thing that company would do, but I wanted some differentiated technology to go in because there were some drugs on the market already.

So the idea was, you'd have a cable that goes to the drone, and that cable would send power. And you could also probably do things like maybe some of the control, like the brains of it, maybe I don't know, if you want that on

putting the veins oil on the robot, so you send it up, and it just stays the or, you know, autonomously. And you know, what, that's a little bit turnkey today. But at the time, we were doing it, it wasn't so much. We are, uh, you know, that wasn't the the only tightness of company it was a starting point. And so we want some good military, you know, multimillion dollar contracts about that. We were working on getting it into an acquisition program. And I can tell you, there are many companies building tele drones today. So it was sci fi wasn't successful, but the concept was successful. And it's in pretty hot demand for the familiarity application applications because of the capabilities to do both surveillance. You know, I getting eyes on 24/7. And also, communications videos work a lot better when you put them up high. The effects of terrible on the transmissions,

yeah, but it seems to me like a really good way to bootstrap infrastructure. Like if you need to set up quickly, it's like, oh, we have a security camera that's deployed there through a drone, it's kind of thing or boost your radio up and put it real high. Like that's very nice. Very clever. Okay. And so you said, so a few things were interesting there that you said. So first, you had preparing it for acquisition? Does it mean you kind of created the company with the intent of it being bought?

Oh, no, I am sorry, I meant in that context, I meant military acquisitions, making sure that you're in the palm cycle in the military budgeting cycle. So that money exists when you're ready with the technology and prototype. Yeah, and at the same time, getting to a point where we got it deployed, we did get it deployed with a Rapid Equipping Force and will then be used in Syria and Iraq, very successfully by a special forces.

Gotcha. I mean, that feels really good to positively impact our troops and it both iRobot and and sci fi works. It's like you were contributing to some of the difficult situations,

it doesn't matter. Some sci fi, someone came up for Special Forces. Perfect came up at a conference and said, Hey, I heard that thing is out there saving saving lives. So you couldn't tell us much about the missions, of course, but actually, they did tell us I was having great effect. And the same thing that I wrote about once. You know, once I was speaking at the War College, and I was between two, you know, three star general, my vide and a four star general on my left, and I assumed everyone would want to go speak to them after the conference, but a lot of the soldiers came up to me and one guy, remember, he shook my hand and said, I want to give you my coin because this pack bought saved 11 Guys on one mission, and you know, that was really rewarding can be the Pentagon actually did a study and the pack blood should have been credited at that time, even more today. But at that time, they've been credited with saving the lives of hundreds of soldiers and 1000s of civilians.

Wow, that's absolutely nuts. It feels like it's kind of like, it's amazing. And it's probably hard to wrap your head around, like the abstract notion of saving lives for this kind of thing. But I it's just wonderful. Like, what a crazy thing.

And then so you said that sci fi works wasn't successful, in your opinion, or this kind of thing. Oh, we I,

I live in the we had a difference of opinion with the investors that I bought on in the direction. And at that time, I decided, you know, the person who first deployed the PAC bots over in Afghanistan, he asked me to come in and join, he became the acquisition executive, that's the person who runs the, you know, the, you know, multi billion dollar acquisition flows on all of them for the OMA and he wanted me to come on and be his special robot advisor. So I decided to take that opportunity. Because I didn't agree with the direction of cycline.

Yeah, that must be frustrating. I've heard many, many people that I've talked to that I started robotics companies where the investors wanted to go one way and the founders want to go what another way? It's a very frustrating spot. Right? Right. Uh huh.

But at some point, you got to say, you know, they have that opinion. They're gonna pick on that The people and if those people make it happen, the company's gonna be successful. If they don't, it won't. And I can tell you this one was really well set up to be successful because there's a really hot demand for the technology.

Yeah, and then so but it just wasn't where you were personally interested in taking it. And then this other opportunity popped up to advise on government purchases of robots, right?

The government research and development of robots AI and machine machine learning.

That's super cool. So that was, so I got to

work in the Pentagon for two years. Which was great. I mean, I, you know, I stayed in Boston, where I reside, but we went down, though, every few weeks to spend days down there. And, you know, my office was the Pentagon?

That's so crazy. Yeah. How was that? Like? I don't I don't know much about it, or what would be involved? Like, what? I don't know, how was it?

Well, after selling, you know, over a billion dollars worth of stuff to military, right, it was interesting to be on the other side of the table, and see some of the, you know, constraints they're under, right? I mean, there's a lot of hard working, patriotic, very, very good people, and you say, why can't they just do this? And, you know, sometimes there's a lot of reasons that they just can't do that, you know, mostly, you know, it's against the law.

So, you know, give me a specific example.

Well, you know, even if they want the technology, it has to go out for competitive bid, and you have to have the evaluation criteria, and you have to, you know, go through the process, because someone will complain like that, Congressman, and then there'll be a bit dispute, and it's better, especially when you're dealing with billions of dollars to get the program right from the beginning. So you don't have to, you know, lose it, you know, later on, because the, the, the soldiers need this equipment, right. So, sometimes, you know, even if it's a really, really good product, and you know, it's going to be the winner, you really have to go through the, you know, the process.

Gotcha. either. Yeah. So that's interesting, it's interesting to do that, that's very different than like how startups might operate, or this kind of thing, because you don't have the implications. Like the voters and all of this, if it goes badly, you just like, do something and fail and try and whatever. It's interesting to be on the other perspective. Did you? I don't know, like, any. Like, I was very impressed. So I talked to a previous episode, Tim Chang, from DARPA, about the sub D challenge. And I was really impressed with that. The like, it seems like a very pragmatic approach in robotics, to these hard challenges, and I'm trying to start these communities around around this area, I should

say, DARPA does have a little more leeway, because of the way it's set up to be able to work with universities, and, you know, get those great new ideas into the military. But when you get to a, you know, a knowledge acquisition program, it has to be, you know, go through a process.

Yeah, so were you kind of responsible for advising these large purchases, or I wasn't funding a process or

I was brought in to give an honest opinion on the state of the robot technology. And I didn't take a role in any particular acquisition program. But I think people kind of thought of me as a trusted adviser, and I can't talk too much about it. But I think I really did have a great impact and getting some of the, the drone and the ground vehicle programs in the right direction.

And how did how did that end? So was it just the end of the term? You have a two year term? Or how does it

Yes, I I actually went until my first appointment and out and they would have had me come back, but especially with COVID. Like, I couldn't even fly down to the Pentagon anymore. And, you know, I, I was at the point where I felt that I'm doing something else to push the robot field further would be what I most want to do. I see.

Okay, and so now this comes to Tertill, right. That's the next jump. Okay, now, tell me a bit about Tertill. Just the set up in the premise and everything.

Okay, so Tertill is a company that builds a weeding robot. It was invented by the gentleman that I mentioned, Joe Jones, who was invented the Roomba when he was I know but and he, him and Lloyd McKee, again, he they were out of they came out of harvest automation, which was an agricultural company. And once they had finished with that, they decided that they wanted to be back in the consumer game. And, you know, Joe, we're thinking about all the different applications that have robot potential and weeding, you know, is really at the top of a lot of people's lists those jobs that are just tedious and hard, and, you know, you're in the hot sun. And it's a job that, you know, you do once in a while, you know, find somebody who likes it, right? Just like you're fine. Believe it or not, you find people that do like vacuuming. There's always people like that. But, you know, it's, you know, a lot of people like it, but they like it on their schedule, like not when it has to be done. So Joe, thinking about the problem, he looked for a robotic solution, because, you know, we believe a Tertill that an AI robot that you don't have to do things exactly like a human does. In fact, to be more powerful, you don't really want to do things exactly like a human, you want to do them. You want to set up the past, so a robot can succeed. So an example is, you know, maybe Roomba can't do everything that an upright vacuum does. But it should does well going on to the beds. Something that an upright vacuum doesn't do well, doing under the couches and the robotic applications, it doesn't matter how long it's on the you know, covering the whole space, and now with the latest technology generations, ensuring that the space is covered. So you know, when you think about it in robot terms, instead of in human terms. So one way to do the weeding to get back to total, one way to do the weeding would be you know, you have a fully dexterous manipulator and you, you know, you use your AI vision system with lots of machine intelligence, and you say that's a weed, and then you come down and you, you know, you have your dexterity to go down and grab the wheat and pull it up. And then you have to grab it and pull up the, you know, the roots. Or you use events, lasers or something like pesticides. And in thinking about that, that's a long way, right? Because that plant has already sunk nutrients out of the soil, you have a disposal problem with the plant. And you know, quite frankly, powerful lasers are expensive and pesticides.

we always consider lasers, because you know, having a robot with lasers, it's just inherently cool. But may not be the most practical approach. So what was built instead was a robot that prevents weeds from ever growing. So with a scrubbing, scrubbing wheels, it keeps seeds from germinating. And with a spinning weedwacker. If one does pop its head up, off with it. And original Loomba navigation strategy, it negotiates through the garden and covers the entire area using local intelligence. But it's got some inventions on it. It's got capacitive senses that sense the plants, and it's got a very innovative pump sensor that uses the accelerometers.

So it actually, would you just for our listeners who are only listening, would you describe it? Describe Tertill a bit.

This is a small, round green robot, it's about eight and a quarter inches wide and about maybe four inches tall. And it's it's got wheels that have cleats on them. Four wheels that are a camford with cleats on them that makes a very,

you know, just at an angle that 45 degrees. Yeah, tilted so that they kind of like scrape the Earth. Yes. And in

fact, we build a not very good die system because we want to be scraping the earth when we turn rather than lightly travel. Like many robot applications.

That's so funny. So you turn all the wheels

I think they skid steer it's really the it's really the combination effects of scrubbing and then the weed whacker that makes it do such a good job.

So then in the middle of the robot, so you have the wheels and then in the inside of the wheels in the center of the robot there's a little tiny spinning thing that has like a wire like a weed whacker.

Yes. It's not just like a weed whacker. It is. Yeah. This is the only thing Part of the robot that that you have to change, so maybe three times a year, you have to pull it out, within a, just do it like that and you push it a new one because it does wear out when it hits locks and other things in the garden. It does have a little USB port here that whoops, does have a little USB port here that if you take this off, you can see a little mini den, I think it is where you can plug it in and charger. But the great thing about this robot is you never have to, because it's got a solar cell on the top. So you're putting your garden at the beginning of the growing season, and you leave it there and every day when the sun comes out, it charges up when it gets down to you know, when it was when it goes out and weeds when it gets down to something like 70% battery, and these all changeable numbers, but 70% battery, it stops weeding, and it charges again, and then when it gets to a certain number, it'll come back out and do the do the weeding and then when it gets down. And that way, we really use the batteries really lightly. So it lasts for years. You know you're using them so, so nicely. And it makes it run throughout the day. So if it's, you know, if it's cloudy in the in the morning light, it'll, you know, keep running in the afternoon, it also has some very intelligent algorithms. So I'll go sit at the sunlight, rather than under a tomato bush. So it's really a very intelligent little robot that lives in your garden runs on sunshine, and does the weeding so you don't have to

Gotcha. So it drives you basically set it in your garden, and just leave it and then what it's going to do is charge period charge with the sun and go knock out some weeds when it drives around for a small period of time each day,

individually throughout the day, so it doesn't just come out once it comes out a few times every day and does the job.

Gotcha. And so how much ground can this little robot cover?

About 200 square feet of a garden. So that's about you know, an average size in ground garden. Some people have smaller ones these days with a you know a vase bed but you know, if you're putting in a garden you you know you have to so it covers a reasonable sized garden.

Gotcha. And it detects the weeds to kill because they're small enough to drive over.

Well, it doesn't really detect the weeds or kill it prevents weeds from ever growing. What we have to do is protect the plants. Now, you know, as I mentioned that capacitive sensors are very good and the accelerometer based bump sensor is very good. But if something's less than four inches, it will consider it a weed. So we do what all good roboticists do to make robots work and that's cheap. The way we cheat is if you put a seed in, yeah, well, I am what what I'm holding is a thin wire that's molded into a curved shape that you can put a round put around a seed that you planted a small seedling that you plant by just pushing it into the ground. If you plant a row of carrots, for example, we have a row God and you just push this these along the row so the robot can't get to your carrot seedlings. And once the plants four inches tall you you can take these out or leave them in and it's really your choice to take them out. You could just be used them.

Gotcha. Okay, so when it's driving around, does that mean that it's what weed whacker is always going? So like Does it smell plants? Or does it?

It can sense the plants, we've discovered that having a duty cycle does actually help the performance so we can send so we can just have a duty cycle just Yeah. And get them all. Gotcha. It doesn't take that much. Damage power, especially when it's not hitting anything.

We don't just keep making it's got a duty cycle.

What do you mean exactly by the duty cycle? It's on for a little bit.

It's gone for a little bit. It goes off? Yeah.

Oh, is it? Okay, so it's base. It's like almost like it's full power than offer a little bit than full power than offer a little bit while it's driving. So it's

yeah, you need to have a weed whacker. You need to have them spinning like a very high speed weed whacker. Right.

Gotcha. And then, so what what is what exactly is it sensing in the environment? So you mentioned that it can move into the sun, if it's in the shade.

That with its solar power system light with a solar panel, so

it's going to drive on till it reaches some sun kind of thing, or how does it work?

It? Yeah, it just doesn't stop. If it's too shady, it keeps going for a while and it you know, it looks at the average reading over time and goes back to, you know, web it, it looks a bit if you know, wants to know, make sure there is some sun before it starts looking for sun. So yeah, if you have an average eating and, you know, none of these things, you know, these things are tuneable. So we've done the best job we can, you know, tuning them that we that, you know, that we could do, but they are things that we can vary if we need to at any time.

Yeah. Okay. So I am imagining that this takes a lot of lessons from the Roomba. So like, one thing that was very obvious to me as a like Roomba tie back, is that you have the one button. So like with the Roomba, I have heard that it's like you just have the one button to start it. And this Yeah, it has the one button as well push it. And that just goes and you don't have to worry about

it didn't always have one button, right? That was a lesson learned. We had three buttons, and they were labeled S, M and L. So small, medium and large. And we get questions all the time. What's a small room? What's a medium? What's a large room, so then we started putting numbers out there, then people are really confused because they don't know the area. And so it was a little it'd be much better to have one button. You know, now they say clean on it. Right? So that's what you want to do you want to clean you press one button. And the on off switch the first ones we had on the room, but were labeled zero and one. So one is one is on and zero is off. But you know, people would say well, I put it on. Oh, isn't that on? And it was not obvious to most people. 40 year old

Well, it's kind of funny that we would do that. Like, yes.

I mean as a roboticist. Like, it's like, oh, yeah, I got it. Like, yeah, I know what you're going for. It's like all you but it's not for all of the other anyone who's a general consumer, I see what they mean with zero seems like Oh, fraud. Like, it's totally it's off to so.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what the confusion was like, why? Well, what about off? Oh, so we designed it with one button and the one button. You know, it's, it's something that people can understand, like, you put it in the garden, you press a button, and it stays there. And it's on and it's running in the garden for the rest of the, for the growing season.

And then so, so the operation of this as you just put it there, you push a button, and then you walk away until winter, I suppose

that would be ideal. That would be ideal. But in reality, because we live in reality. Mine and even though I made my space pretty. I mean, I am a little bit of a lazy gardener. So my place isn't really nice. And you know, beautifully make do anything like that,

if I had to free it a few times during the year, like it would get stuck, and I would give it a kick. But that's a few times as opposed to every day, you never have to charge it. You do have to replace the weed whackers every, you know, every few weeks, but apart from that, you know you're good to go for the season. So it really is, I'd say one of the most if not the most autonomous robot out there because it's solar powered. You don't have to charge it. And it just stays there and does the job for you. Like a little creature living in your garden? Like a Tertill? Yeah, like a kettle?

Huh? Yeah, I see. And so you mentioned that the control style or the control scheme is a bit like the original Roomba. Does that mean it's gonna just drive around randomly? And then eventually, like in the limit, it will have covered the whole garden

space Yes, although it's never been manned. And the moon does whenever random a us you know, local intelligence based on the the, you know, the local sense of meetings, to negotiate along walls about obstacles and to try and cover you know, an area and then move to the next area. So neither you know, the original room has went random and this one's not random. We don't have a full positioning system yet. And you do have to put a boundary around the area where it's working like there was a luxury in the house that the walls originally that pretty much we had a boundary because of the walls. Turns out most vegetable gardeners have a boundary or they don't mind putting one in. You can take a piece of wood you can take the VO Gods the pieces of metal that it comes with you can buy at stripping a metal one from From Home Depot or Amazon, you know, there's a lot of easy solutions for it. But it is one of the reasons why we don't advertise it for landscape beds, because it's a little tricky to explain where it can and it can't work. And, you know, you do have to have a boundary of bounded and some landscape bed, that's fine, I've got one in a landscape bed in the front of my house. And it's wonderful, I don't have to weed it. It's amazing. What I didn't mind having, you know, when you have, like, you know, you know, some beautiful shrubs, I have some bamboo in a, you know, with a bamboo belly around that most people can't stop bamboo from growing, but my bamboo isn't going so everything else was going in that bed. So I put, I put a barrier around the where the bamboo Spedding farm and I'm giving it a chance to go in. I also put one on my gravel last year, you know, got pea gravel. And we can't advertise for that either. Because at the end of the season, I'd look down, there'd be some little portly plants growing that had established a boot structure. So that type of weeding we do to venting, which doesn't quite work. But where I didn't have the Tertill weeds were like, literally up to my shoulder, like up to my shoulder. Like it's crazy. What was how fast the things could grow in a growing season if you never take care of it. So for me, you know, it works great. If you don't mind a few little leaves in your in your gravel. But I you know, advertising it for that would be would be hard. But we have a lot of users who use them on on landscape beds, because they figured it out for themselves that I meet the criterion. And so we can have it running. And it's not a problem. You know, you got to have your plan set of space, at least about a foot apart. You have to have not too much. Exactly, yeah, yeah. So the robot can go right between them. You want to have not too, not too much undulations a barrier around it. And it doesn't work on really chunky mulch, like you know, a lot of landscape beds are mowed. And that prevents weeds. I put motion fresh and even last year, about a month later, I got weeds all over. So it's really chunky motion. It won't work. But I have it working on both beds that have final motion. It works fine.

Gotcha. So what have been some of the biggest challenges with this robot it? I'm imagining weatherproofing it it's interesting to have the small set of sensors. I don't know.

Well, I actually jumped into this. After they kick started it, and I bought one on the Kickstarter. So I can do this. Because my vote because you know, Joe started the company and I knew him and some of the other guys and of course, I'm gonna support the Kickstarter. I, they delivered it. And I you know, I put it in the garden. And I think, you know, it worked for a little bit then it stopped working. And I didn't care because it was a Kickstarter, right. And it's a robot and I buy lots of robots on Kickstarter. And quite frankly, I like that. Oh, yeah. Yeah, anyone could tell me a robot on Kickstarter. Because I want robots to exist. I want more robots to exist. Yeah. So everyone should always support the small robot companies just you know, get the robots try them out like that. So many people said that to me about Roomba. Like I got one of the early ones and look at the generation they have. It's like, no, no, that's 10 years in. You need to get to these companies when the first kick started when they're, you know, just have it on the market for a few years. But I was anyway, I got the robot on the Kickstarter, but it stopped working. And I didn't really care. So but they actually came over, took a look at it and replaced it. And I then I put it in my vegetable gardens. And I was actually amazed that it worked. It was like night and day, right? It was like instead of going to my garden, and it was a weedy mess, because I you know I'm not one of those people who does it every week, you know, on time. Instead of going there with my daughter and you know, I get distracted because I don't like the weeds in it, you know, instead we can go and garden together right? Instead of you know, instead of it being a chore it's like a more fun experience about growing your own food. So I really loved it and they I was looking around of what to do after the you know, after the military appointment and you know, I called them up because I you know my mind I was thinking about outdoor robotics because you know, I'm not going to go into us right because we will visit inside I was thinking, Hey, I see the robot lawnmowers taking off, you know, I've got a Tertill meeting my goal. And that might be another space that you don't they've maybe thought about that and not pursuing and I could take that and learn from them. And instead, they invited me to come on and be CEO.

Tertill's Website

Helen's LinkedIn

Tertill's on LinkedIn

Solar Powered Robotic Weeding

Cheating, Like a Good Roboticist

Saving 11 Soldiers' Lives

High Powered Lasers

Helping the World

Bullish on Robotics

In this episode, Audrow Nash speaks to Tobias Holmes, Quality Assurance Manager at Blue River Technologies. Blue River uses computer vision and robotics in agriculture and was acquired by John Deere in 2017. Tobias speaks about herbicide resistance, spraying weeds, quality assurance and testing on hardware, and on encouraging kids to learn robotics.

Tobias introduces himself

About Blue River

Agriculture 101

How non-row crops are handled

Row crops and herbicide resistance

How weeds work

Strategy for row crops

Genetically modified crop

Blue River and John Deere

What Blue River does best

John Deere acquisition

Timeline for Blue River

What it means to Manage Quality at Blue River

Quality assurance in hardware

Machine learning in weed spraying

Testing systems in the fields

Thoughts on robotics and agriculture

Using AI in mechanical design

Encouraging kids to program + learn robotics

Advice for students

Links

This is a conversation with Tobias Holmes. Tobias is a Quality Assurance Manager at Blue River technology, which uses computer vision and robotics and agriculture. Blue River was acquired in 2017. By John Deere, we begin this interview with an introduction to agriculture and the problem that Blue River is working to solve. This includes talking about row and non row crops, and herbicide resistance, both of which I knew very little about before this conversation. After establishing the problem, we talked about how blue river systems work, quality assurance and testing and hardware, machine learning and weed spraying the acquisition of Blue River by John Deere, the future of robotics, in agriculture, and on education. This is the Sense Think Act Podcast. Thank you to our founding sponsor, Open Robotics. And now here's my conversation with Tobias Holmes. Would you introduce yourself, Tobias?

Hi, I'm Tobias Holmes. I am currently the manager of quality at Blue River technology here and in Sunnyvale, California, a subsidiary of John Deere Corporation. And, and yeah, I've been working in robotics for about seven years now.

Would you tell me a bit about Blue River?

So Blue River, the company started out what what our co founders, Jorge Harada, and Lee reading. A couple guys from Stanford, decided that they wanted to bring high tech, you know, high tech tech high technology into the agricultural space. So years ago, probably about 10 years ago, they started out going carried harvesting. And you take what's out there harvesting, Carry, carry weeding, sorry, carrier weeding, and in 30 days, yeah, so basically being able to look at a carrots and be able to clean up the weeds that are around the character that the character actually gives you more read more of the harvest, you get more of a yield from the harvest. And and that was something that that was interesting, there was a problem that was happening in the world, they were in the tackling that using various robotics technologies, and talk to a girl who was like, Hey, you guys have a nice technology here. But what I really needed to be utilized is in leading of row crops, and so Blue River transition from

What are row crops? I don't know that much about agriculture. And I don't know about how carrots maybe are not row crops. What's a row crop?

So row crops are when you typically think about a farm and when you're on a farm where a grower grows, they grow their crops into these like, you know, very uniform rows across their entire field. And that this allows them to get the maximum amount of yield from a particular crop you're trying to grow, it maximizes the space that you have, in order to to get the most out of it.

So you just plant them, like optimally spaced in lines. And why why are carrots not row crops? I would just assume everything is planted in a row.

So carrots typically are, you know, they kind of they're kind of scattered around. And, and you just kind of like throw the seeds as you go out and implant them. Wherever they're last row crops, we actually like very used machines that are very, you know, particular about where they grow, where they are, there's less, there's less ambiguity, and the in what our place, they're very, very structured and very, very light, you know, every 10 inches, you know, just depending on particular crop, they're very, they're 10 inches of space from each other 30 inches, you know, from the next row, it's very, very prescribed, whereas non real crops are, you know, they kind of they kind of are planted in a row, if you will, but but but what, what, what typically happens is you plant a couple in a row, and whichever one is the best, the best vibrant one after a little bit of time, you kill the other ones, and then you keep the you keep the one that you want. And so river did that kind of work in agriculture in California. You can imagine there's lots of vegetables, fruits that are grown here and they've grown in that manner. You planted a couple of them, as you go down and the ones that's the most viable, that's the one you keep, you kill the rest.

Okay, and you kill the rest so that the one that looks most viable, or best at that time, has more resources available to it less to compete with in that spectrum is a better harvest. Maybe.

That's right, it's so better quality ones.That's, that's right. You know, you want to give that, you know, every, every person wants to bigger to see or strawberry, bigger, juicy carrot, whatever that is. And so, so and so that allows you to say, okay, hey, I planted these in a nice bed of a fertilized ground. And whichever ground is a is is a, you know, whichever one out of the of the three or four, that is more viable. That's the one that I keep, and then I kill the rest. That's right. So as you get more and more, you get more yield is what we typically call it, a grower typically, is concerned about the yield of the crop that they they are planning, and they want the most yield for for the amount of planning.

So they have a certain amount of space, and they basically want to get as much product, carrots or whatever it might be, as possible for that amount of land.

Okay, so with row row plants, row crops and non row crops like carrots, does the machinery change for because I'm imagining like a big tractor driving down tracks? And so I'm thinking for the non row crops, which you said are kind of in rows anyways, does is it like squishing a bunch of them? Is the row was I would imagine it's going kind of in the seams between the rows of plants.

And so yeah, so you can imagine it, there's like these little mounds of dirt you create, and even something depending on where you are in the country on the world. That can be different, but But essentially, you're maximizing the land space, and you're maximizing the ability of that particular seed to to be the best year. And so the transition. And so the transition is, is you don't you don't carve out so much land, because you don't know, when you know, particular crops like that are fruits and vegetables, you don't know which one will be the one that actually takes hold and is the champion, if you will, that part of the land to give you put three or four of them down to see which one is really taking the resources out of the ground. Yep, in a row crop, you know that, hey, if I plant the seed here, this probably gonna grow if I plan in perfect places, you know, soy bean, and the particular row crops that we're talking about soy bean, cotton corn, if you plant them there, they're probably going to be just fine. The thing that will be the resource, so the resource wouldn't be the resource like pool wouldn't be weeds, it would be the... Excuse me, I said that wrong. And a vegetable crop, you want to plant multiples, because you don't know what the crop itself will take? Yeah in the row crop, you know, the crop itself will take but then there's competition as weeds. And so now you have to kill the weeds and vegetables and fruits, you need to plant multiples, because that that we'll see may just not grow right on its own. So you can't just plant one and I know that that one's gonna, but you got to plant multiples. Because you know, out of the if I plant at least four, one or two of those guys are going to grow. Yeah, and then you and then you take the best out of the out of the group was in row crops, I plant a seed that seed is going to grow the only competition is weeds. Yeah. And, and so and so in that situation, you know, you're planning, you're planting seeds that are going to grow, you just now need to make sure that you you provided the best environment in order for it to grow.

Gotcha. So if I understand correctly, when you have the non row crops, you just have like a hump of soil that goes back in a row effectively denotes a non row crop and you just like throw seeds all over it. Right plants will come up anywhere in that big wide row and kill the ones that look less promising to save the ones that are more promising. Okay. And in the row ones, you just have a narrow row where the seat seat seats easy. And they Oh, yes. Right. And so in the non row ones you are killing the competing ones of the same species that are less viable. And row row ones you're more concerned about killing the weeds that are competing with the crop you're interested in. Is that correct?

Okay, so with going back a little bit, so with Blue River they were starting with these non row crops. And then feedback from customers was we are interested in row crops. Continuing from there, what happened?

So Blue River had to make a shift right that the, the technology, the actual even even the agro agronomical When I say agronomical, I'm talking about the Cool World, the word the the way that you know, you do something in agriculture,

Is it like economical but for agriculture?

agriculture, so So in this case, we have all the seeds that are out there, and we want to get rid of the ones that are not viable. So how did you do that, in a way an agricultural? And so and there's multiple ways you can play, you can spray herbicide, you can go in and dig up the ones that you didn't want, you know, or you can you can you can even apply her fertilizer, and that's what Blue River did they apply fertilizer. And what happens if you apply too much fertilizer to a plant? It'll explode it, you know, it'll just grow so fast that it can't exploded. Realize think about that is not that that fertilizer is in that soil. The other plants that makes the one that is viable, ie that one, how can can grow stronger, because now you have made a very fertile environment. The ones that were weak exploded, but this guy that is not weak, took that took that fertilization and use it and grew better.

So again, not knowing much about agriculture, why does it... so it explodes, it grows too fast, and then it can't support that or something? Why? Why? Why does it die? Because it grows too fast? Because it's just it's just the fertilizers a kind of Yeah, how to put that it is something that encourages the plant to grow very fast, but good plant has to be able to handle it

Does it grow to... is it like a startup in some sense, that takes venture capital funding, and it basically gets a huge investment, but if the money, so you grow rapidly, and then expenses are coming, so then the... Essentially, you're going too fast. And I would put a similar startup somewhere going too fast if you don't have the funding, but the but you don't have the infrastructure if you don't have the infrastructure to handle it. Right. So that viable crop, right, that one that is like it's gonna it's gonna sustain, that one has already has gained all the things necessary to reap the benefit of that fertilizer. These other ones are set in such a non capable state, that when you you feed them fertilizer, they, they grow so fast, but they're not capable, they're not ready for it. In other words,

So they grow before they're ready, and they overextend themselves. There you go, it's too much, this is too much ploom. And a guy,

I'm thinking of like Napolean now and having too big of an empire, and then it collapses. It collapse. And you could think about it as you could think about it, as I have too much resources that I cannot contain it, I cannot help hold it within my infrastructure. So I need to so I so what happens is it just explodes. Whereas the plants that are the plants that can handle that they take it in and they use it and grow, which is what to expect when you get you know, like, like an investment or an increase. And it is a ridiculous amount. Right? It is a it would be like, you know, you give somebody who's never had a business before in their life, you know, 30 million, right? Like, they don't they wouldn't know what to do with that property. Right? Yep.

Gotcha. It's like getting rich, quick kind of thing. And then it just goes away. Okay. They have no ability to deal with it. Right and no ability to deal with it. Yeah. And the thing about that is that that money doesn't go anywhere. That money is still out in the environment in the system. Yeah. And that and and that next crop that's next to those to those in those plants that get killed that way, reaps the benefit of it. So you're fertilizing. So it's kind of a two pronged process. You're gonna fertilize your soil anyway, because you want your plants to grow. But the ones that are not viable, you fertilize it to the point where they're going to die, but that overlying fertilizer still stays in the ground and allows the ones that are not going to die, to grow, to flourish to be better. You harvest those, that ground is still very fertile with all those resources that you come in are still there. You can go plant again next season, the grounds fertile, it grows again. You do this process again. So you're, you're kinda you know, it's kind of a cycle. fertilizing the ground but also getting rid of the the the weeds to the crops that are not going to they're not going to make it right if you give those guys an extra shot, so that they so that they they're not going to make it and then...

Is this row crops where it's weeds that are competing, or we speaking about non row crops, or both?

That was non row crops. So in row in a row crop, it's a different environment and that's what I was talking about agronomical tools, right. And so in a row crop. You know, fertilizing the weeds is not the way to go, right? You don't want the weeds to grow. You want to deplete the weeds, you want to show that was removed?

I see. So that was with the non row crop, what we're talking about with over fertilizing them. So you do it to the non row crop that are not promising. And thus, they grow too fast, then they explode and die. Not literally explode, probably. But for the row crop, you're saying now we have a different strategy?

That's right. And that's what I'm talking about the agronomic the strategy, right is that so and so in agriculture, in plants, you can imagine there's this a variety of plants and in the agronomic, the agricultural world is just as varied as humans, right, there's just life itself is just so varied. And it's even more so in the plant world. And so different strategies are needed for different types of plants that you're going. And in a row crop situation where you know, the seed is going to take, you know that when you plant that seed, it's going to come up and it's going to come out of the ground, it's just a matter of how much yield you're going to get from it. Your strategy there is different because now you're not competing with others, like seeds, you're completing what you're competing with, what we are completely different plants that are trying to suck the resources away from the plant, you're trying to, you know, the cash crop is what we call it. And, and so in that situation, you actually want to kill, you want to alleviate that leak, you want to alleviate those plants,

Alleviate is a funny word for that. It's the problem, you're alleviating the problem, and thus you're killing the plant. I see. It's killing the plant, it's killing the plant. It's making sure that that plant because you never really kill it. You never really kill it, right? Like like those, those,

But you remove it as a competitor for resources. So you think about plants, you think about life, life always wants to persist, it doesn't really die, right? It's hardy. That's absolutely true.

Only the cash crops die occasionally. We purposely we purposely harvest those, right, but the weeds are just there. And the interesting thing that happened, so just go back, you know, 30 years, they had what roundup they had they had, you know chemicals that could that would you know they have their crops genetically modified, you can spray the entire field, we call that broadcasting. So you spray the entire field with herbicide, the plants that you were trying to keep were genetically modified so that that herbicide did not kill that plant. But it killed everything that wasn't anything like that all the weeds that were in that plant that had a modification in it to that herbicide. And so all those plants and what you would see if you could go down a growth field and would be what we call clean, you would only see the crop that the girl was trying to grow, meaning there was nothing else but everything else was dirt in the field or soil. Only the crop was there. And that now was the American agriculture for 3040 years, you know, using these genetically modified plants. Okay, what happened was is over time he is talking about life and how hard it is you kill the just dude, you killed all the weeds that were susceptible to that herbicide. And the only ones that are persistent were ones that were able to fight through the herbicide. And so now they became they build up the herbicide resistance. Valerie's so now they are the old herbicide resistant plants are the only ones that are reproducing. So now when you reproduce you're only be producing herbicide resistant plants and that is causing a huge air a huge battle man gotcha because now you now the plants are being able to build up resistance faster than the engineers can build up new technologies to actually kill those those resistant plants. And so now now you're not you're having, you know, what we call unclean fields, fields where growers are spraying. They're planting crops and these herbicides are resisting it. And so now they have to come up with something different different chemicals different ability to get rid of the plants. And that's in the timeline of like the 30 years you said... So 30 years, 30 years we've been using the Roundup herbicide, we've been using herbicide, or I would say the last 10 years is where they really become maybe in the last five years is where they really become prevalent herbicide resistant weeds, to the point where they're, they're, they're starting to, like, you know, hey, the strategies that growers use, and there's multiples, as herbicide, there's a there's a will be called a field fighting you call when you kind of just trim up the dirt in the row to kill some of the weeds. There's multiple techniques, but but like I said, you know, alleviate the problem, you want to give the crop that you're trying to grow and get killed from the one that you're trying to sell the best opportunity to win in the, you know, in the competing of resources that are in the ground. So you want that crop to get as much of the resources as you can, and to provide, you know, the weeds and other things, less resources so that they die off?

This may be a silly question, but why not just make an incredibly resource dense field and have a bunch of weeds but also have your cash crop? Because the weeds the weeds are. The weeds are. They're called weeds, right? They're just plants. Yeah, but we call them we undesirable not cash plants. And the reason why is because they they're very effective and sucking the resource in that you won't your cash crop will not crop, they will take over.

Starving it of resources and they grow way quicker.

Their genetics are so that they will take over. And those viable those viable crops that you really want that you want to keep, you know, which was you know, when you think about, you just think about society, and you think about, you know, just biology again, in the world, you know, things that are valuable to humans, particularly the humans are things that are scarce. So things like you know, cotton soybeans, plants that you could eat plants that you could, you could read, you know, something that was due Sunday, they weren't just plentiful everywhere, and everybody could just have it and it was great. In order to make that, especially for the population of the world today, you have to very strategically go and grow it. Right. That's kind of how the world got as populated as it as it has, is because we no longer just kind of go hunt and gather and just go find where they're where the right stuff is off the tree as it grew naturally. Because in order for it to grow naturally, you would have to get in an environment naturally, that just didn't have enough competition with all the other farmers in the area, so that that thing could grow. We're very specifically saying, Hey, we like apples, we like strawberries, we like

So we have to definitely beat off the fauna that would that naturally just grows, that naturally will just take over. It is and isn't, you know, necessarily beneficial to us. It's right, it's plant life, but we're trying to specifically grow plant life that's beneficial to us. And all the other plant life around is like, hey, I want to use this. I want to take this spot up. Yeah, you're and they don't use much energy, right, that the reason why those things are valuable is because fruits and things like that need a lot of energy from the ground. And so, so it's easy for these other things that don't bear fruit that don't give us any benefit to grow and rapidly take over the land because they don't, they don't need a lot of energy because they don't provide anything of value to us. Fruits and you know...

Stuff that we can harvest from them. You can think of the things that that humans care about us the fruit, right. And, and those things. Take energy. The things that we don't provide fruit, necessarily don't don't take a lot of energy. And they they're prevalent. They're everywhere. Yeah.

And by fruit you mean anything we can harvest. Right? So like, I don't know, cotton? Like the seed probably is not a fruit. But you mean that as in something we can harvest and then use? Is it correct? Yeah, absolutely. So the bulk..

Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay. And then so what was the strategy for row crops? So the strategy here for row crops is to, it's a cool thing that Blue River did, is because you're talking about agriculture, you're talking about a customer in a market that's been around since the beginning of the United States, right? It's this goes way back. John Deere has been a company for hundreds of years in the US. That's awesome. And so the agriculture is is a mainstay in the United States. And that customer in that in that market is not very open to drastic changes. They've been doing things the way they've been doing it for the past 20 years. You're not just going to come in here and say, Hey, I got the spaceship or I got this cool technology, they're just gonna make your you know, they're very adverse to those kinds of things because they know what they've been doing. They've been doing that for for, you know, for a long time. And they're very adverse to very crazy out of the box changes. And so what we did was okay, you already use herbicide, you're already spraying your entire field, with, you're broadcasting your entire field with herbicide to cover every anchor, right. So if you got 1000 acre field, doing spraying the entire 1000 acres with herbicide, even though there's only beads in certain pockets of that field, so you just bring everything but Blue River did was with the court and we did have this novel was a you know, add a camera to that, to that a sprayer, the same spray, you always been using the same technology, you used to use any like pointed out things, we added a camera, the camera can look at the ground, it can tell where the weed exactly located, and then we spray onto the weed. Instead of spraying the entire field, you only spray where the weed is.

So now you only kill the herbicide you only spray where we need to spray the herbicide. And you can imagine like you're reducing the cost of the grower, you're reducing the the herbicide that's in the ground, you know, causing environmental impact. And, and so and so now in the give the girl the opportunity to use the same technology that he's used to using, but being more effective and more efficient, and you give them the opportunity. I was talking about the herbicide resistant weeds, you give them the opportunity to use different chemicals. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Because before you sprayed everything, so you have to use an editing modified herbicide in crops, because you want to be able to spray everything, you don't want the crop to die. Now if I can just tell you, I can just hit just the wheat and not everything else. Now you can use different chemicals, different herbicides to target the week. There you go.

Now do you need to use genetically modified crops for this? Because you're killing things in the same field with some sort of herbicide? Or like, do you want them to be slightly resistant to it? So that something in their system is not like say you spray this one weed in this field of cash crop? And does that impact negatively the cash crop that's around it? Or is it a small enough and precise enough dose? That it just kills the weed and doesn't damage the crops? Or is it a trade off between the two. So nothing's ever perfect, right? So there's It depends, depends on the cash crop, you're using some cash crops, you, you want to be able to, you want to be able to genetically modify them so that you can spray the crop as well as the week. And then depending on depending on the cash crop itself, you don't want to spray it at all, you want to spray justly. And so and you think about you know, the situations and the variances of fields, the variances of crop types, the variances of wheat, you know, you have all those different things, and depending on the situation, you want to apply a system that works for your situation, right. And so the focus of Blue River, and John Deere in overall is to give the customer the ability to tailor their system to their situation. And give them a system that that effectively will work for them, given the situation. So some situations you can genetically modify, spray, just the wheat and a little bit of the crop and it doesn't hurt some situations you want to be able to spray, you want to target test that weed only and you don't want to spray the crop at all.

One thing just to clear up: Would you talk a bit about the relationship between Blue River and John Deere. Because we mentioned it but just to like explicitly talk about how they are related. So Blue River was around right there was a startup company I talked to you about the founders. Yeah. And and eventually they you know, not just John Deere, but other agricultural companies were interested in purchasing Blue River and I think John Deere won that war, the war if you will, and

It's nice to have a bidding war. Sure. So the use of the technology and the viableness, and the need, I think is real, like it is absolutely 100% a real problem that's happening across the world. And it needs to be tackled it like it has to be tackled. John Deere was was one of the first people to say hey, this is a you know, not just not even just this particular problem with the herbicide resistance,

Yeah, yeah. Just, you know, applying artificial intelligence and in high tech, high tech, you know, things into the agriculture, agricultural world, that now that's a new thing, right like that these these, these companies, you know, John Deere particularly, have been operating and using, you know, machines for for, you know, hundreds of years. And they have grown a Technic technological advances, but, you know, they haven't been implementing, you know, artificial intelligence and, you know, high definition cameras and high, you know, a very high power computers. Yeah. And so, so making the next step, I think John Deere thinking about making the next step, and where does agriculture have to grow, you know, and for the future, to continue to sustain and to continue to maintain, you know, for the population that we have on this earth, that these technologies need to be in, you know, integrated into the agricultural industry, and saw Blue River as you know, what the way that we want to tackle the problem using AI, using very high performance computers, using, you know, advanced technologies, you know, they in robotics, they saw that this was a nice day, this was a nice, a nice integration into their company, gotcha them to give them the ability to, you know, to use robotics to robota size, if you will, their machinery that they had already had, that they already built, they already make.

Gotcha. So we then see, we're spraying herbicide on the weeds in a cash crop, a row cash crop field, is this kind of the, I guess, where does Blue River go from there before being acquired by John Deere? Or is that is that kind of the core competence of the company? So So we essentially, you know, the mentality is give me up to give the, the CRO or the plant by plant knowledge, so that they can make a smart decision. Right, so we have cameras, we have artificial intelligence, we have the ability to make real time decisions using robotics, right? So we use robotics to be able to say, hey, real time, this is what this plant needs. And that was Blue River, and still is, it's blue rivers, you know, driving force, you know, you can look at the plant real time and decide right there. What does this guy need. And that is, you know, when you, when you think about any, any person who's in agriculture, or, you know, planning biology, they will tell you, the plants that grow the best are the ones that are taken care of individually, this plant needs this, this one needs a little bit of pruning, this one needs some fertilizer, this one needs, he has weeds growing around it. So Blue River was allowing you to do that and, you know, skill level, you know, not not your pot in your house, you know, where you kind of hand doing in the field, in the field and 1000s of acres with a machine, you know, that you can just kind of let it do its thing. And you as the grower don't have to sit there and do that.

And is it only is it only spraying plants? Is it also trimming or any of these other things that you've mentioned. So you can you can imagine the technology can be advanced, if the original, you know, this initial, like induction into the market is spraying plants for herbicides, because that is a very prevalent problem. And it's something that Blue River was already doing. But you can imagine.

It's cool, because you can retrofit existing systems. So that's very nice.

Retrofitting existing systems, developing new systems that are very, you know, optimized. Yeah. Then and then extending the see and sense technology, kind of like, you know, we talked about this a little bit, you know, seeing and think and actuate, your podcast. That's exactly what Blue River, you know, long term, you know, overall, that's the goal is to be able to sense the environment, do something smart, and then actually do something smart to the ground or do some smart and get world sense. This is exactly what your podcast says and think about it, think about agriculture, all the different things that you have to do, you have to plant the seed, you have to take care of the seed when it's down in the ground at the fertilizer, you have to weed it, and then you have to harvest it, and then you take it from harvest and you have to get it out to the market so that they can be sold. So there's just a lot as there's a wealth of, of tech, you know, this, the agriculture industry is just I won't say behind but just has been doing things a certain way for a long time and it's a fertile ground. For new technology for New for new ways to go about to bring that that sense. And they can actually wait, you know, paradigm into that world. There's, there's just oh my god, it's just so many different ways and opportunities. Yeah, that's absolutely right, John, John Deere and Uber are being acquired by John Deere to get us right in the forefront of it. Because, you know, that's the one of the biggest agriculture companies in the world. And, and so and they do all that they do everything, you know, from planting, to harvesting to, you know, to tilling the ground to getting it prepared, and as well as other industries construction. Forestry.

So what do you what do you mean? Oh, are you saying John Deere does these?

Yes, yes, yes, John Deere. And so Blue River, you know, bringing in the sense and think kind of a mind frame, into an industry and until a company that already has its footprint across our world and all established? That's right, all.

And they're, they're I mean, they're domain experts at the actual markets that they're servicing. So agriculture, and then other ones you mentioned. So then partnering with them, where you guys are being you're helping on the sensing and thinking side, and then they can kind of use their existing systems are retrofit your systems into it, or even add your systems design your systems Integrate them, exactly. Really great, really at the foundational level, right? Let's develop new systems. But let's rethink how we do this. We know how we do it already. Right? But we do it, we did it already with previous Well, you know, what previous experience, now let's bring in this new technology, and let's rethink how we could do it. You know, if we, if we bring in, you know, different sensors, cameras, lasers, and sensors, you know, smart algorithms, and different, you know, different ways to actuate in different ways to go about doing something. And then now, you know, and now change the future, right? Like, you know, you could just think about all the different ways, you know, that AI Robotics has changed the world, and it's gonna continue to check the world, you know, before you have to have a human in the loop, right? Yeah, human beings, humans just do it fast, literally, when it's asked. And now, you know, you can provide a smarter machine that can do that can do this task.

Or one person can do a bunch of fields and effectively have a bunch of like, robot workers on the tractor doing the hard manual things. Absolutely. Very focused, intensive. Absolutely. Let's see. And then. So with Blue River? What? Wait, so I'm just curious, I guess, how was it? You were around? When John Deere purchased? Blue River? Correct? That's correct. Yes. How, how have things felt to you, as things have changed with that? Like, how is the focus changed? Or what kind of problems are you guys working on? What's interesting about being acquired, and the process of that?

I think it's, it's very, like, for me, personally, it's been very interesting just to see a company transition from you know, very, you know, startup, you know, environment, you know, get out there and fire in the belly, we got to make something we got to continue to, you know, develop this product that people are interested in, grow into now, you've been acquired by a company, that is totally has the resources to make sure that you grow, but we need to grow it in a direction that is actually going to be viable, and actually going to be, you know, a product is actually going to be put out to market, and customers are going to receive and use, and, and having all of that expertise and that knowledge of all those years of John Deere manufacturing, agricultural sprayers, and any piece of agriculture milled with the high technology. And you could you could already think that there's going to be a lot of challenges, right? That's a two, not necessarily two different worlds. But you know, you know, kind of different environments kind of have to mesh together. And I praise John Deere, for giving us the ability to kind of keep our autonomy as far as developing the technology and going as fast as we can to continue to develop it and grow it and, and make changes as we need. But keep us kind of, you know, I would call it. What do you call that leadership and management? You know, John Deere has this division, right? This is where this thing needs to get funneled into. You guys have the ability to do whatever you think needs to be able needs to be done in order to accomplish this, this goal here and we're trying to accomplish and the goal is big enough and broad enough, right? That it encompasses all the things that they're doing, right? It compasses, not just the sprayer part, which is just as one part that we're working on. And probably the first thing that will roll out, just because we're Were Blue River was the most mature in the area. Yeah, but but we could, but we're already developing other areas. And so And so John Deere just has a great vision has the great wherewithal. And I think because they have acquired companies that just have all the experience, are they the company's been around for years, they know, you know, the ability and the way that they they went about the acquisition after it happened, and the way that they're slowly bringing a sense of their, into their environment, and so their world, but still allowing us to be Blue River, I think is great. And I think it says kudos to them. Because they could have totally just came in and say, Hey, boom, we bought everything we own everything you got, they're gonna do his like how he said, and they didn't do that. They, they, they, they said, hey, they appreciate you guys have something special here going on. We don't want to affect that. Want to allow you guys to continue to do that. But we want you to do it in this direction. Yeah, in any directions aligned, which I think is another, you know, smart thing on them. And I think what Blue River as well, to reason why we got acquired by John Deere is because the directions aligned very well. So and so it was like, Yeah, this is gonna work. Right. This is gonna work, you know, kudos to our CEO, for you know, navigate that because Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, making those making those things happen. And then he's still around, right, like our CEO still here or is still doing job. You're still managing he still going? You know, very important things for us. Yeah. And, yeah, we can say that this is working out pretty pretty nicely. I

Hell yeah, so what was the timeline? So founding of Blue River acquired by John Deere... We got founded 10 years ago, that's, what this is 21, so 2011. Yeah. So and then. And then, we got acquired by Deere in 2017. So that's what six years after the founding, they got acquired by dear God. Yeah. And so here we are 2021, four years after acquisition. Still, still going well, and probably going to bring the first product to market. Two years from now.

Two years? Can you talk a bit about that? Or is that a secret? I can say that it's coming. That's about it. I mean, not any details, but it's, yeah, the first, the first product will be is coming soon.

Nice. That'll be exciting. So then, can you tell me a bit about your experience? So you, you Quality Manager, Quality Assurance Manager? Can you tell me a bit about what that means? And I mean, I've been in academia most of my time, so we don't really have this, would you tell me a bit about your job as a quality manager? Absolutely. So, so Quality Manager is, you know, this is an essential part of the business is to make sure that the customer receives, you know, value in that product, and that the product that they get is what they expect, not only what they expect, hopefully it sees expectations, but But you know, first and fundamentally is what they expect. And, and so it's making sure you know, I think about it this way, you can have the startup mind frame, you know, and just really just gone, you read this, move fast and break things with us break things, you put something out there, but there's all kinds of bugs with it. And depending on your market, and depending on the customer, you think you think about your, you think about these phones, you know, 20 years ago, and they and they had all kinds of bugs and issues with them. But the customer you were dealing with was okay with that right? There early adapters are okay, yeah, I can I can I oh yeah, I gotta do this thing, or I got to press it two times this way and do this in that way. And then it finally works. Right? You know, so that that was fine for that environment. But for our particular customer, you know, agriculture customer, they want to bring in John Deere, you know, name recognition. You know, it just works. John Deere has the reputation in the in the, you know, the cloud that when I get a bite when I buy a John Deere, it works out of the box, I turn the key, it does what I wanted to do. And if anything is wrong, they fix it Johnny on the spot, no big deal. High quality high, you know, I pay a premium, because it is the high quality product. It's the best, right? It's one of its, I would say it's the best, right? It's the best that you're going to get. And so how do we maintain that right? How do you know John Deere has maintained that over years, over centuries? How do we maintain that and so my job is to allow blu rays For developers, the ability to continue to grow to continually to develop this product and continue to iterate and make it better, you know, the Bay Area Silicon Valley, quickly area area can fail. But when we release something out, or release something out to the to the, to the customer, it is it has that John Deere quality it has that this is going to work, it is robust, it is going to do what you guys told me it was going to do. So I'm the kind of the gatekeeper. I'm like, yeah, go develop all that cool stuff, go get in the lab, go write your code. Let's get out here in the field. Let's go test it. Let's go. Let's come up with all the cool things that we can. But this is what we can release. This is what we can, this is what we can give out. Because it's ready. If it ain't ready yet, you know, hey, it's not ready yet, guys, we gotta go back rehash. We, you know, reiterate. You know, and so and so I want to allow those guys the ability to continue to reiterate and continue to develop product, you know, features and things, but only allow John Deere quality features got ready to go. And so that's, that's my that's my cool, cool. Yeah.

So does it what does it look like in a little more detail? Is it like when I think of quality assurance engineers, I mean, I'm at open robotics, and we have a lot of software. So quality assurance for us means like, writing software tests, or making sure we have certain amount of code coverage with our tests or whatever, these kinds of things, it sounds like your work is a good bit more applied as in like, go in the field. Can you just tell me a bit more about what it involves?

It's that right? Is that and but But you said you said exactly. It's definitely you know, unit test, you know, code coverage of things in the software stack, right. But it's not just a software piece of equipment, it's a robotic piece of equipment. Yeah, and so and so it has to actually perform out in the field. So there's more things than just does the algorithm behave the way we expect, but just the mechanical devices to behave the way we expect, can can the cameras and the wires and the things hold up to the environment that we're going to throw them in. And then again, I said earlier about, we gave the customer the ability to use a platform that they were already used to using. And they're already used to use it in a certain way. So they already used to have in this sprayer that I parked out on the corner over here, and it rains on it, and it it snows on it, if depending on what part of the country you're in, you got it that the environment you're paying to it, but I can turn that key next season. And it goes and it does its job. So making sure that all of the pieces and all the all of the parts come together the integration, in a way in a way that that when that customer is actually my North Star is customer turns, the key thing does what it's supposed to do, or at least tells you hey, you need to go do something, you need to go do something right, you know, your camera cables, have fried over this past season, go replace them, you know, and so making sure that all of those things are there, the quality is there in and of itself. And when it isn't there, it is very obvious to the customer, what it is they need to go through to fix it. And so it's it's you know, it's unit testing, it's called coverage, like a software company that has those features. But it's more customer focused, it's more, it's more customer focused. So we definitely have to go out and test it on the machine and give it real machine time. Yes, see, to see what the customer is going to experience and give them the best experience we can get.

Okay, I'm curious about the hardware side of this. How do you deal with software, if I write tests to constrain my code to make sure that it's working, the tests fail if the code is not working? And then I just run these frequently. And I can tell if my code is working over time. What do you do? So that that, to me is clear for software? How do you test hardware to make sure that or even like hardware and software and their integration together? How do you guys do this? Yeah, no, I'm sure. I've seen like with Boston Dynamics, or some robotics company, they'll just have their robot do the paces. So they'll have it run and move continuously for a week or something like this. But can you speak a little bit about this? How do you...

2 posts with the agriculture tag