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Leaders
November 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 6
10 entrants, alongside nine from Poland, two from Bulgaria and one each from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo and Slovakia.
First and second places among the Rising Stars were held by two Czech companies, online training platform for traders on financial markets FTMO and cyber-crime fighter GreyCortex. In third place was Croatian design and development agency Speck.
Russia’s first AI-powered harvesting successes open the way to a wave of agritech innovation
East West Digital News in Moscow
Cognitive Technologies, an established Russian software corporation, is developing one of the world’s most advanced autonomous AI-based driving systems for farming equipment. Under the brand ‘Cognitive Agro Pilot,’ this system was used across 35 regions of Russia when reaping the 2020 harvest, reports East-West Digital News (EWDN).
“Between June and October 2020, over 350 autonomous harvesters fitted with [our] solutions farmed over 160,000 hectares of field and harvested more than 720,000 metric tons of crops,” says Sber, which backs the company.
The harvested grain crops included wheat, soybeans, barley, oats, sorghum, buckwheat, corn, sunflower, etc. in a variety of Russian regions and districts around the cities of Belgorod, Kaliningrad, Kaluga, Krasnodar, Krasnoyarsk, Kurgan, Kursk, Penza, Rostov, Stavropol, Tambov and Tomsk.
Cognitive Technologies claims that the businesses involved in these operations were able to save an aggregate of over 500mn rubles (around $6.5mn
This year, for the first time, the firm published an Impact Stars ranking for companies that have a clear ethical dimension at the heart of their business model. “This year, we are taking to new heights our commitment to recognising companies that are inspired by making an impact on the business, environment, society and diversity amongst employees,” commented Jarek Skvrna, CEO, Deloitte Central Europe,
in the report.
at the current exchange rate) thanks to the use of these unmanned technologies. These amounts were saved on fuel and related materials as well as due to “shorter harvesting time, a more active use of harvesters, fewer human errors, optimization of business processes, and other parameters.”
Cognitive Agro Pilot is touted as “the world’s first system that ‘sees’ and ‘understands’ what’s lying ahead.” This is “an advantage over other solutions that usually utilize a raft of tools for their control models: laser scanners and stereo cameras,
GPS navigation with RTK positioning, etc.”
When controlling a harvester by the Cognitive Agro Pilot system, the edge capture is “stable at no more than 10 cm, which lets you avoid unnecessary passes and fuel losses.”
Meanwhile, with the autopilot mode on,” the setup avoids obstacles and stops when detecting a threat of collision with other equipment or people.”
In September 2020, Cognitive Agro Pilot received the ‘Overall Harvesting Innovation of the Year’