Big Machine Autonomy - A Big Thing At CES 2025

Autonomy of Things (AoT™) is not just about the more popular ridesharing cars and robotaxis, which generally grab media attention and consumer focus. The combination of artificial intelligence (AI), computing and sensing provides significant business incentives and societal benefits by automating tasks that are difficult, dangerous and unappealing to the workforce of the 21st century. Big machine companies today deliver autonomy for industrial, mining and agricultural tasks, and provide tremendous value in diverse applications like mining, quarrying, agriculture, garbage management, river dredging, airport logistics and yes - construction on the moon! There are major differences with autonomous cars on public roadways - lower speeds and operating in terrains where pedestrian and other vehicle traffic is minimal and more disciplined. The immediate payback is productivity, augmenting scarce and qualified human labor, increased safety and taking over work that is physically challenging.

It is surprising that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the forum at which these companies choose to have large booths, publicity and marketing messages since their commercial activities are primarily a B2B (business to business) transaction. It makes sense since each of these applications impact human workers and end customers, and gaining their confidence in the safety, efficiency and convenience of autonomy is important.

Caterpillar Inc. celebrates its 100 year anniversary in April 2025. Starting as a merger between the The Holt Manufacturing Company and the C.L. Best Tractor Co. in 1925, it generated $67B in revenues in 2023, and is a global leader in manufacture of construction and mining equipment, off-highway diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines and diesel-electric locomotives. The company operates through three primary segments – Construction Industries, Resource Industries and Energy & Transportation. A recent article discusses its pioneering autonomy efforts in the quarrying sector.

At CES 2025, Rob Hoenes, senior vice president in the Energy and Transportation segment shared a few thoughts about autonomy and electrification efforts underway. Mining customers have demanding sustainability goals and have a significant focus on reducing environmental and noise pollution. Battery technology and electrification are big priorities, which Caterpillar has been focusing on for the past 25 years. Heavy mining equipment like the CAT 972 front loader are undergoing retrofits to transition diesel operation to a hybrid one, featuring an electric motor, two strings of lithium-ion batteries, an inverter, high-voltage components, power electronics and an onboard diesel generator. A 3.6-L diesel generator set runs AC power to a rectifier that converts energy from AC to DC. The energy created can be used to charge the battery (Figure 2).

Typically, the battery operation can last several hours before needing to recharge. According to Mr. Hoenes, the key to extending battery life is to optimize overall flow of operations in a mine, from excavation and loading of trucks to transport and unloading. Ensuring no buildup of material and vehicles at any location is critical, as is modulating speeds and trajectories of trucks to minimize braking. Autonomous operation is critical in ensuring the optimal cadence of material flow and longer times between battery recharging.

Apart from optimal workflow in a mining location, autonomy has other significant advantages - it addresses the acute shortage of skilled labor in remote locations, enhances safety and preventative maintenance procedures and allows trained human labor to control multiple pieces of moving equipment from remote locations.

“As a technology leader making industries safer, smarter, more sustainable and more powerful for nearly a century, it was exciting to celebrate our 100th year of innovation at CES”, said Mr. Hoenes. “For our next 100 years, we'll continue to be driven by one thing: helping our customers build a better, more sustainable world. Our customers face incredible challenges that technology helps solve. We will continue investing in electrification, alternative fuels, automation, connectivity and digital solutions to power the new ecosystems that customers will use to build humanity’s future."

From farming and landscaping to construction, John Deere has been actively investing in autonomy and has multiple products operating today. Its slogan at CES 2025 was “Real Purpose, Real Autonomy”, a journey that started 3 decades ago. In 2022, the company launched its first autonomous tractor which is currently in operation across a range of customers.

At CES 2025, the company demonstrated its autonomy technology across a variety of applications - agricultural tasks in open fields and tree filled orchards, articulated dump trucks for construction (460 P-Tier, see lead Figure) and commercial landscaping. The motivations for autonomy in these sectors are optimal workflow, addressing skilled worker shortages for physically challenging work and minimizing safety incidents.

For agriculture in particular, the planting season is incredibly short (2 weeks) and securing a stable and reliable supply of workers for such short time-frames is very difficult. Autonomy is critical here and achieved by using a 360° perception system that uses 16 cameras with an overlapping Field of View (FoV). Many of these cameras provide stereo vision and depth information at a 25 m range. Powerful lighting systems allow operation day and night. The perception system data is processed locally on an NVIDIA GPU and integrated with a GPS system for mapping and localization. These machines typically run at speeds of 4-15 mph and can detect and maneuver around human and other obstacles.

Mining and quarrying equipment (like articulated dump trucks) and commercial lawn mowing equipment use a similar autonomy stack. In orchards with trees and overhanging branches, variations of this stack are used, with the addition of LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors for longer range 3D perception.

Komatsu, founded in 1921 and headquartered in Tokyo, Japan has annual revenues of ~$40B and addresses applications in industries like mining, construction, forestry and utilities. At CES 2025, the company showcased a variety of applications in these sectors that used autonomy to varying degrees.

Two applications under development were particularly unique.

The first is and underwater underwater dredging machine which is remotely operated to dredge the river floor for marine and ecosystem studies, disaster prevention, renewable energy, environmental conservation, and eventually underwater mining. It uses pressure sensors to control the optimal depth and angle at which to dredge. The vehicles operate at depths of 7-50 m. and have an overhead mast for communications and GPS. Komatsu has been building such underwater dozers for riverbed dredging since the 1970s, but the latest developments incorporate significantly higher levels of autonomy and electrification for safety and environmental reasons (Figure 4). It is not clear whether there are plans to use optical sensors like LiDAR and cameras to pre-map the riverbed floor, which is critical for sustainability and efficiency.

The second really impressive development is in lunar construction. Sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT) and Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), extensive development efforts are underway for a lunar excavator machine (Figure 5).

The Lunar excavator is planned for deployment in the 2030 timeframe.

Oshkosh Corporation (not to be confused with Oshkosh B’Gosh which is a children’s clothing store also based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin) designs and manufactures specialty vehicles, military vehicles, truck bodies, and has brands like Oshkosh AeroTech, Oshkosh Airport Products, and Oshkosh Defense.

On display at CES 2025 were a range of everyday applications that the company has introduced with “moments of autonomy” in tasks ranging from emptying garbage cans, identifying and sorting of streams of recycled items, perception systems for firetrucks and emergency vehicles to warn of impeding crashes, autonomous baggage handling at airports and alignment of a jetway to the entrance of a airplane door. According to its press release, “Oshkosh Corporation today is announcing electrification, AI, autonomy and connectivity solutions to help everyday heroes—such as firefighters, soldiers, postal carriers, construction workers and people doing tough work on the tarmac of an airport.”

Aligning a jetway to the entrance door of an aircraft for passenger boarding and deplaning (Figure 6) is one example of Oshkosh applying moments of autonomy to complex tasks, typically carried out by humans under demanding conditions of noise, wind and mental tension. Misalignments can delay flights or cause expensive damage, and the autonomy that Oshkosh integrates brings in allows for precise alignment through a combination of human-robot cooperation. Another area of autonomy is the debuting of a driverless cargo handler for airports. According to the company press release, “This fully electric, autonomous vehicle is designed to efficiently transport baggage between designated locations on the airport ramp. Equipped with LiDAR, radars, cameras and cutting-edge sensor perception, as well as object recognition technologies.” Oshkosh displayed other numerous and well placed pieces of autonomy that alleviate the physical labor of everyday tasks like garbage management including an innovative on-demand solution for closed campuses designed for automated emptying of garbage cans and disposal of its contents (Figure 7).

The Autonomy of Things (AoT™) revolution is well and flourishing in non-buzzy and far-from-sight applications. It alleviates the physical hardships and lack of trained labor for traditionally difficult and physically challenging tasks, with higher safety and operational efficiency. Solutions displayed at CES 2025 deliver immediate and significant business advantages to end customers.