Podcast discusses FIRA, practical applications of embodied AI and humanoid robots

In Episode 169 of The Robot Report Podcast, co-hosts Steve Crowe and Mike Oitzman recap the 2024 FIRA event with several interviews from vendors attending the show.

In this week’s featured interview, editor Eugene Demaitre speaks with Dr. Russ Tedrake, vice president of robotics research at Toyota Research Institute (TRI), and Scott Kuindersma, director of robotics research at Boston Dynamics. They discuss their collaboration on humanoid robotics and the integration of artificial intelligence through large behavior models.

The researchers also explore the challenges and opportunities in developing general-purpose robots, the importance of human involvement in learning processes, and the role of data in enhancing robot capabilities. In addition, the discussion touches on practical applications, deployment strategies, and the significance of rigorous research in advancing robotics technology.

Show timeline

• 6:30 – Advanced Farm Interview
• 15:52 – Reservoir Farms Interview
• 24:27 – Twisted Fields/Rotate8 Interview
• 31:58 – Bluewhite Interview
• 43:02 – Featured interview with Russ Tedrake of TRI and Scott Kuindersma of Boston Dynamics
  

FIRA 2024 recap

Oitzman attended the 2025 FIRA event for agricultural robotics in Woodland, Calif. It featured outdoor demonstrations in a specially cultivated field in the parking lot of the Yolo County fairgrounds.

On the show’s first night, Advanced Farm Technologies hosted an apple harvester demo at its headquarters in Davis, Calif.

For the past two decades, apple growers have begun planting new orchards similar to vineyards, using a trellis planting method. The trees are planted closer together, and then all of the branches are trained into a 2D trellis form, where the trees are only about a 1 ft. wide by 4 ft. long by 15 ft. tall.

This creates a “flat canyon” between rows easier to drive down and the fruit gets more sunlight. It’s also perfect for automation like the Advanced Farm robots. The Advanced Farm test trellis uses 3D-printed apples on magnets attached to fake trees, but it works well for simulating an actual orchard. The podcast features an interview with Advanced Farms CEO Kyle Cobb.

Reservoir Farms announced a new agtech incubator that will open in the first half of 2025 with two sites, one in Salinas and the other in the Central Valley. It provides a maker space for building, with shared machine tools plus secure storage onsite in the form of a storage container. Each site will also feature onsite cultivated fields for testing of the robots.

The company will plant whatever crop is key to the startups onsite. It is also developing partnerships with UC Merced and other local colleges and universities to provide facilities for senior projects or research labs on campus access to fields. The podcast features an interview with Reservoir Farms CEO Danny Bernstein.

At FIRA, we ran into friend of the show Daniel Theobald. He was at the expo with his Twisted Fields farm, which is also an agtech incubator. On display was a prototype robot being developed at Twisted Farms by the new company Rotate8. I met CEO Katie Bradford to learn more about the new venture. The company will be launching officially in early 2025.

Finally, we caught up with Bluewhite‘s CEO Ben Alfi, to learn more about a new partnership with CNH tractors. Bluewhite has completely productized its automation package to retrofit CNH tractors with full autonomy, and it is now training CNH local distributors to perform the retrofits in the fields or equip a brand new CNH tractor as it’s sold.

The result is that Bluewhite should begin to see full-scale deployments anywhere around the world where CNH tractors are being sold and supported.

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