First Open Source AI for Driverless Agri Vehicles

Cognitive Pilot, a joint venture of Russia’s Sberbank and the Cognitive Technologies group, has announced the opening of a testing facility for autonomous agricultural machinery with the Peschanokopsky Agrarian Group. At the same time the companies say they are creating the world’s first open dataset for autonomous agricultural machinery training, called Cognitive Agro Dataset.

The Peschanokopsky Agrarian Group claims to be one of the biggest agricultural companies in Russia’s Rostov Region with a land use of more than 35 thousand hectares. The group has three divisions whose main activity is grain and industrial crops cultivation and its farm machinery fleet consists of more than 200 agricultural vehicles.

The dataset will include images and clips from video cameras and data obtained from odometer and inertial sensors installed on autonomous machinery. Previously the data has been collected only within Russia. However, since last year, the company has collected data in Brazil and this year it is expected that the United States, Canada, China, Argentina and South Korea will join the list.

CEO of Cognitive Pilot, Olga Uskova, said: “The goal of the project is to create a unique tool that will allow software developers of autonomous agriculture control systems to effectively solve the problems of neural networks training on real data. This partnership and the launch of the new training facility will let us recreate the widest variety of different cases and situations, including different weather and lighting conditions, which are of the highest value for database development.”

The developers plan to complete the work and publish the results at the beginning of next year. The dataset will consist of eighty thousand 10-second videos. Such short duration of the recordings is due to the many and varied field scenes and for the convenience of developers.