Who's winning the CES autonomy race? Not cars
LAS VEGAS — This week's Consumer Electronics Show unveils major new autonomous transport products for farms, boating and construction sites, highlighting a yawning gap with autos, where scalable driverless technology is further away.
The group of offerings include autonomous tractors, construction dump trucks and boats that dock themselves, as well as a robotic golf cart that doubles as an AI-enhanced super caddy.
That these products are already poised for commercialization betrays the sophistication needed for autonomous road travel even if companies like Google-backed Waymo are making some headway.
On roads, "the complexity of the problem multiplies significantly", said Barry Lunn, CEO of sensor company Provizio.
The machine learning challenge for cars amounts to "the hardest AI challenge in human history", Lunn said.
The difficulty reflects the array of unpredictable factors that can interfere with road transport, such as unexpected manuevers by fellow drivers, pedestrians or falling branches.
These conditions, known in tech circles as "edge cases", are present in every kind of autonomous transport, even if they seem uniquely difficult for cars.
In marine transport, edge cases can involve poor light or rainy conditions, said David Foulkes, chief executive of Brunswick, a boat building company.
These dynamics, as well as the presence of salt and other deposits in a marine environment can interfere with key hardware.
At CES, Brunswick is showcasing the autonomous docking system on the Boston Whaler, a 40-foot luxury boat that uses six stereo cameras that are derived from military drone technology.
Brunswick saw little upside in broad use of autonomy because recreational boaters relish the experience of driving but docking is the one area where boaters "appreciate additional help," said Foulkes.
"Just like every other autonomy system, you kind of spend 20 per cent of your time on the main use cases and then all the rest on the edge cases," said Foulkes, who worked at Ford for 18 years.
Learning system
In agriculture, technologists also face distinct complications.
Willy Pell, chief executive of Blue River Technology, which is owned by John Deere, said the company discovered that lights on tractors attracted insects at night, which can interfere with key sensor equipment.
"A moth weighing less than a single ounce would bring our 40,000 pound machine to a halt," Pell said at a news conference Monday. "It was a software bug in all senses of the word."
Three years ago at CES, Deere unveiled a driverless tractor that could be operated from a smart phone.
Whereas the original machine could only perform very narrow tasks such as preparing soil for planting, this year's "second generation" model uses many additional cameras to drive faster and perform more tasks.
The system incorporates thousands of real-world experiences, reflecting "years and years of farming across these different edge cases", Pell said.
The 188-year old agricultural equipment maker is also presenting an autonomous battery-run lawn mower for landscaping, an autonomous dump truck for construction sites and an autonomous diesel orchard tractor.
The orchard tractor can be used to spray insecticide six to eight times per year, the type of work where skilled labor is notoriously scarce.
Looming questions
When it comes to car autonomy on public roadways, companies are making progress but still not close to mainstream adoption.
Waymo, which now operates commercial robotaxi service in three US cities, recently faced a novel security challenge after female riders in San Francisco were harassed by another vehicle that followed the robotaxi, according to a December Washington Post report.
Waymo, which served four million autonomous rides in 2024, plans to add its service to other US cities and Tokyo in its first international foray. The company's co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana will headline a keynote later this week at CES.
Other big autonomous players at CES include the Amazon-owned Zoox and car companies such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW, which have received approval from the German government for autonomous driving in very limited situations.
While major player Tesla is not at CES, some exhibitors are preparing for the day when today's driver is able to tune out the road.
"Consumers are looking at cars as... another environment where you want to be relaxed or enjoy yourself," said Jeff Jury, senior vice president at Xperi, which sells multimedia technology in cars.
"You're going to see a continual march towards autonomy but this idea of full autonomy [in cars] is still 10 or 15 years away," Jury said. "There's just too much that needs to be worked out."