Researchers at Olds College of Agriculture & Technology and CNH have broken new ground by releasing a study that establishes a new way to evaluate future efforts to develop autonomous farm equipment.
The peer-reviewed paper, Autonomous Agricultural Equipment Evaluation for Broad-Acre Crop Production, has been published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE).
Congratulations to the following co-authors: Roy Maki, research project manager at Olds College Smart Farm, who led the study; Sofia Bahmutsky and Ashutosh Singh, data scientists at Olds College Centre for Innovation (OCCI); and Travis Burgers, research engineer at CNH.
The paper quantified the efficiencies of autonomous agricultural operations using four years of research at the Smart Farm. The project started in 2020 with the DOT power platform, which was rebranded in 2021 as the OMNiPOWER platform, and ended in 2024.
The research team compared in-field performance of an autonomous system to conventional machines for seeding, spraying and spreading operations. They also developed an innovative efficiency metric to evaluate performance.
New ground was broken with the formation of a baseline methodology for autonomous broad acre study and evaluation. New terms like route efficiency (RE) were created and defined as key indicators to describe autonomous equipment.
Burgers said Olds College is especially positioned to execute innovative projects like this study, which will benefit its industry partners as well as the local and global agricultural industry. He praised the research team for its work bringing the paper to completion.
“Sofia did a great job as first author documenting the work and pushing the paper through until it was published. This type of work takes a load of grit, persistence and rigour that can be easily underestimated, and she did it in parallel to starting her PhD program.”
“Sofia also led the effort to create the route efficiency metric. I get excited about new ways to quantify performance, and this metric provides a different insight into operations.”
Burgers also praised Singh for his work with data analytics. “In projects like this, it makes things easier if you can tell a story through the figures, and Ash did a good job creating and tweaking the figures for our story.”
“I watched him grow in understanding about how telling the story with consistency across multiple figures makes it easier for the reader to understand the story.”
Read the paper online at ASABE, and learn more about the OMNiPOWER research project at our Olds College web page on Smart Agriculture.
This project was supported in part by Canadian Agri-food Automation and Intelligence Network (CAAIN) with funding from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED).
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