GPS World, February 2018

MACHINECONTROLUPDATE 42 GPS WORLD WWW GPSWORLD COM FEBRUARY 2018 NEWSBRIEFS RAVEN GROWS PRECISION AG FACILITY RAVEN INDUSTRIES GAVE South Dakota State University SDSU 5 million to establish a Precision Agriculture Facility within the College of Agriculture and Biological Sciences on its main campus in Brookings S D SDSU is the first U S land grant university in the country to offer both a four year degree and a minor in precision agriculture The facility will be the nexus for innovation and collaboration across several disciplines including engineering agronomy horticulture mathematics and the decision sciences according to SDSU President Barry Dunn It will enhance innovation and the development of educational programs that will deliver applications to enable data driven decisions in precision farming ranching and conservation as well as promote collaboration between faculty students and industry experts SENTERA ADDS ELEVATION MAPS ELEVATION VARIANCE MAPS are now available within the Sentera AgVault platform offering agronomists crop consultants and growers additional field insights Topography and elevation data helps agriculture professionals increase operating efficiencies when building variable rate prescriptions creating drainage or land leveling plans and designing subsurface drainage Elevation maps are ordered within AgVault and are delivered as both a color mapped topographic map image and a set of industry standard shapefiles NVIDIA Jetson Takes to the Sky to Improve Worksite Visualization K omatsu plans to introduce NVIDIA graphics processing units GPUs to its SmartConstrution jobsites The GPUs will communicate with drones from Skycatch a Komatsu partner which will collect 3D images generate terrain data and visualize site conditions Komatsu is deploying the artifical intelligence AI project as an extension of its SmartConstruction initiative in Japan the droneassisted automated equipment service was launched to alleviate the burden of the countrys severe shortage of skilled workers The company has deployed SmartConstruction at than 4000 jobsites across the country and the AI extension will be integrated into those sites Working with NVIDIA OPTiM Corp another Komatsu partner and an interenet of things IoT management software company will provide an application to correlate terrain data to jobsite workers and construction machines for visualization Enter Jetson At the center of this collaboration is the NVIDIA Jetson artificial intelligence platform When Jetson which works with NVIDIAs cloud technology is installed in construction machines it will be able to provide 360 degree images enabling prompt recognition of workers and other machines nearby The technology could potentially decrease fatalities that result from workers being struck by an object piece of equipment or vehicle Jetson will also be used with the stereo cameras installed in the cabs of construction equipment and will recognize continuously changing jobsite conditions on a real time basis to better provide accurate instructions to machine operators Future plans call for use not only for automatic control of devices but also for high resolution rendering and virtual simulation of construction and quarry jobsite operations