Kingman Ag, a company that grew out of farm practice in California, sells a retrofit kit called the Minion Mini that lets an ordinary tractor work an orchard on its own, even in dust or where satellite positioning does not reach.
Co-founder Zach Sheely told Future Farming that the company no longer fits LiDAR for navigation and detection. Jobs such as berm blowing in California, Oregon and Washington orchards, and mummy mashing in pistachio orchards, raise a lot of dust, "and LiDAR sensors don't like dust," he said.
Instead the kit steers by vision, using fisheye-lens cameras. GPS stays on board to collect data but plays no part in navigation or path planning, so a retrofitted tractor can keep working where GNSS signals are weak or blocked, for instance under fully enclosed canopies, at up to 7 mph (11 km/h). Loading an existing or recorded field boundary is enough for the system to plan its path.
"We focus on operations in permanent crops where the trees are in the same place for multiple decades," Sheely said, adding that he believes it is the only autonomous retrofit kit able to work with front-mounted implements, alongside the company's patented safety bumper. Most implements need no changes or extra sensors, and the kit fits Kubota, Deutz-Fahr, Fendt, John Deere and New Holland tractors.
Forty Minion Mini systems are now in use, most of them in California, at prices from $20,000 to $30,000. The company demonstrated autonomous mowing with an unmanned Kubota M5N-092 in Gilbert Cellars' apple orchard in Washington's Yakima Valley during the Washington State University Smart Apple Orchard event and FIRA USA.
Source: Future Farming
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