Bay Vision - Spring 2018

Blue River Technology is at the forefront of computer vision, machine learning and robotics in agriculture . The company was founded in 2011 by two former Stanford University students who met in an entrepreneurship class. In 2017, it was acquired by the world’s largest agriculture machinery company, John Deere , in a multi-million dollar deal. Jim Ostrowski , VP of Engineering at Blue River Technology, tells us that they are developing machines that use computer vision and machine learning to be able to sense information about plants and then take immediate action in the field. Currently, they are building a weeding machine that automates weeding for cotton and other crops. Blue River’s original focus was on lettuce thinning. Traditionally, lettuce has been overplanted to ensure a full crop, with an inefficient manual operation using a hoe to take out the unwanted plants. Blue River built agriculture implements that are towed behind tractors to identify lettuce plants and kill the ones that would normally be taken out manually. The machines do the work of about 80 people so are massively more efficient. Why lettuce? Lettuce is a year-round crop that’s grown locally to Blue River - about 75 per cent of the lettuce grown in the US is grown in California, in particular the Salinas Valley which is only about an hour away from Blue River’s headquarters. They worked with a company in Salinas called Valley Fabrication to build the big pieces of metal that form the toolbar, but designed and built all the other components and software themselves. Jim explains: “ We spent a lot of time using traditional methods like support vector machines (SVMs) to be able to detect and classify the different lettuce plants. We use a lot of just color segmentation, using Gaussian mixture models to figure out the right color space and being able to tune that based on a given field .” Having built up a fleet of John Deere tractors using their implements, Blue River began offering a service and contracting with farmers and growers. As they owned the machines, they could keep control, run tests, make changes and fix things quickly and easily. The company then moved on to weeding and began to look at cotton. Jim says that cotton is a different story to lettuce – in farming there is a distinction between row crops like cotton, corn and soybean; and specialty crops like fruit and vegetables. Row crops are grown in big acreage , usually in the Midwest and not so much in California. Specialty crops are typically more high value but require manual labor for things like thinning and weeding. For row crops like cotton, fields are broadcast sprayed with herbicides like Roundup. The crops are highly dependent “Plant-by-plant care is a big area for us: using computer vision as a way of finding something about every single plant in the field and treating them individually in real time.” Blue River Technology 18 Blue River Technology