Jack Kilian: The turkeys react to the robot differently
depending on how many times they've seen it.
When they're younger, they get very curious about the robot.
They'll just get very, very close and peck at it,
which is fine for the robot, fine for the birds.
I have a robotics background and grew up in the Midwest,
always liked farming.
Thinking through where could a robot
really fit in and help?
I met up with turkey farmers that said,
"Yes, please do this."
We thought, "We can do robots, let's do this robot."
Adam Gettings: So, Red Wing is one of the earliest towns
in Minnesota.
It was a river town that was the last stop on the river.
So it developed really early and had a lot of industry.
But they're very old companies. So the question is,
"How do we produce another one of those companies
every 10 to 20 years?"
Red Wing Ignite is a community center
that's focused on innovation.
We hosted an ag-tech challenge last year.
You know, we invited
people within the region to come down
and pitch their best ag idea.
Kilian: Most ag-tech approaches
innovation from the biological side.
That's not my skillset.
It seemed like there was a lot of opportunity
for modernization and new technology in the space.
I ended up submitting the
poultry house robot idea
and winning first place,
which gave me enough money to
buy a robot and actually start testing
and working with local farmers.
John Zimmerman: When someone comes up with an idea
or wants to try something new,
I'm usually pretty open
to letting them work on it.
So, there's lots of uses for this robot.
The primary need now is just, there's a shortage of labor,
and having an extra set of eyes and ears,
whether they're human or artificially intelligent
eyes and ears on the farm, could be of great value
to let our human employees concentrate
on what they can do best
and let the robot concentrate
on some of the more menial tasks.
Kilian: Yeah, so a farmer would typically use the robot
checking in, like in an email or something.
The robot will say, hey, I patrolled early in the morning,
this is what I found. Here's a map of the barn,
and here's where I found any issues in the barn.
If you have six poultry barns, that's an hour of your day
just going in and out of barns.
So it'll allow them to prioritize
which barns they check in what order.
Yeah, right now, we're developing the actual mechanisms
to accomplish the physical tasks we want the robot to do.
It can turn in place, it has good traction.
As it drives around in the barn, it can turn the litter,
which improves litter condition,
which improves the health of the birds.
There's localization devices
so the robot knows where it is in the barn.
Several different types of cameras
so the robot can see everything,
and even thermal imaging
for detecting if a bird has a fever.
If a human can drive the robot around in the barn remotely
and do what we want it to do,
then we can probably train a neural network
or some other machine-learning system to control the robot.
The robot is essentially just another IoT device
that's connected with a bunch of other sensors in the barn.
Getting internet access at poultry barns
has been a real challenge, but it is really
the enabling factor to be able to build a robot
out in a rural community quickly.
Neela Mollgaard: Before you can be a smart city,
you have to have smart infrastructure.
Obviously, broadband would be the first
of that infrastructure that's needed.
Red Wing was forward-thinking, and they implemented
gigabit broadband a handful of years ago.
So, as a town of 16,000, we have gigabit broadband.
Once we have that foundation in place,
we can discover new technologies.
Gettings: The first component is making sure that we have
our technology base available
to the people who want to use it.
But there's a second piece,
which is around activating the entrepreneurs,
encouraging them to take risks,
systematizing how they do it.
This is not the kind of support you're going to get
in Silicon Valley.
Mollgaard: The model in rural communities
has to be different.
In urban settings, you have the density that you need.
You have the people, talent, and resources needed
to have those collisions of new, innovative ideas.
In rural communities, you have to force that density.
You have to bring people together, thought leaders together,
students together, technologists together,
and really try to solve problems using technology.
Kilian: They gave us the connections we needed.
They connected us with the farmers themselves,
who helped really prioritize,
what should this robot actually do for these people?
The birds are healthier, the farmer's happier,
we are years ahead of where we could have hoped to be
without them.