Despite their low-tech reputations, the industrial and agricultural sectors are being reimagined by autonomous solutions. The advent of autonomous commercial vehicles, as well as across warehouse operations, couldn’t be coming at a better time. Within agriculture alone, the American Farm Bureau Federation estimates there are around 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually. Separately, a skilled tradesmen shortage has left 88% of contractors struggling to find skilled labor. “Our agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping customers all have work that must get done at certain times of the day and year, yet there is not enough available and skilled labor to do the work,” said Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere, in a Monday (Jan. 6) statement announcing the debut of John Deere’s latest driverless machines

Furthermore, Agility Robotics has introduced Digit, a bipedal humanoid currently employed in logistics settings, having been deployed successfully in a Spanx warehouse and tested by Amazon.

MIT researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that could enable warehouse robots to deftly handle odd-shaped packages and navigate crowded spaces without endangering human workers. The breakthrough comes as retailers and logistics companies face mounting pressure to automate their operations amid surging eCommerce demand. While robots excel at repetitive tasks like moving pallets, the new PRoC3S technology could finally crack the long-standing challenge of robots safely performing more complex warehouse jobs that traditionally require human dexterity and spatial awareness. “In theory, PRoC3S could reduce a robot’s error rate by vetting its initial LLM-based assumptions against more specific and accurate understandings of the warehouse environment,” Erik Nieves, CEO and co-founder at Plus One Robotics, told PYMNTS. “Think about it like this: A warehouse robot operating solely on LLM guidance has been described how to complete a task. The PRoC3S concept goes one step further by placing a digital robot in a simulated environment of that task