The world has reached a point where blue collar jobs in harsh environments like agriculture, mining and construction are increasingly short of skilled human operators prepared to work in grueling and remote conditions. According to AEM (Association of Equipment Manufacturers) which hosted the CONEXPO-CON/AGG show in Las Vegas in early 2026, o f the numerous challenges construction companies h ave been facing over the past few years, workforce shortage has consistently remained at the top of the list. The current workforce is aging, and it is difficult to attract a younger workforce. A similar situation applies in other blue collar industries like agriculture, mining and logistics. One solution is to embed phsyical AI and AoT® (Autonomy of Things) for limited or full autonomy into the machines that perform the work - preparing the land, hauling equipment, structures and supplies, harvesting the food and extracting minerals. Remote-controlled equipment networks utilize the limited supply of human operator skills, enabling control of multiple pieces of equipment simultaneously from a comfortable control center.

Multiple articles have discussed how major OEMs like John Deere, Caterpillar, Komatsu and Oshkosh are addressing this issue for agriculture, construction, mining and logistics - however, these efforts are specific to their equipment, and for a particular application. In reality, blue collar industry deploys a mix of vehicles from multiple OEMs, spanning different models and vintages, and meeting cost, operational and reliability metrics. Introducing autonomy solutions requires OEM-agnostic solutions that can be integrated on an after-market basis, by independent autonomy providers. Such players exist, for example, Xpanner for solar farm construction, AIM and Pronto for mining. ASI is another player which provides OEM-agnostic, after-market autonomy solutions across construction, mining, logistics and agriculture.

Autonomous Solutions Inc. (ASI) - Pioneering Autonomous Robots

ASI is led by Mel Torre, who founded the company in 2000, based on technologies developed at Utah State University (Dr. Torre was a professor of agricultural robotics at Utah State). Headquartered in Utah, it also has offices in Texas and Colorado, and claims to be “one of the largest privately held robotics-focused companies anywhere” . It has ~700 employees globally including contractors.

Apart from robotics, the centerpiece of the company is Mobius®, an OEM-agnostic fleet management system which supports full automation to remotely controlled steering, transmission, acceleration, braking, and ignition. This enables a single user to remotely control multiple vehicles simultaneously, enabling scalability to coordinated operation of 100s of vehicles in a fleet. It enables operators to dispatch haul trucks between designated loading zones and dump areas. The automated cycle continues until the assignment is completed or the fleet receives a new task.

The autonomy stack includes GPS, LiDAR, Radar and cameras for localization and perception. It uses this information for path planning, obstacle avoidance and vehicle control. The autonomy stack continually communicates with Mobius which then performs fleet management and coordination.

The company started deploying its solutions in defense applications in 2003, followed by engagement with automotive OEMs like Ford. It participated in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2007, an initiative that spearheaded the development of autonomous passenger vehicles and trucking a decade later. In 2020, it announced a sub-contract with Epiroc to supply its autonomous truck solution to the Roy Hill mine in Western Australia, a 55 million-ton/year operation. The initiative transformed Roy Hill’s mixed fleet of 77 haul trucks from manned to autonomous operations and integrate these with the fleet and other mining management systems. The mixed fleet of CAT 793F and Hitachi EH-5000 haul trucks operated under ASI Mining’s Mobius fleet management system.

In 2022, it began a partnership with Softbank Robotics America, for landscaping and logistics, subsequently working with John Deere on fairway landscaping and sugarcane cultivation. Softbank Robotics acquired a minority stake in the company. After the acquisition of the mining division by Epiroc (which owned 34% of ASI Mining) in 2025, Softbank Robotics became the primary investor in ASI’s other initiatives in sugarcane agriculture, logistics (warehouses and shipping ports) and heavy construction (preparing sites to building for solar plants and data centers). The focus is on development and deployment of a wide range of autonomous commercial service vehicles.

ASI’s secret sauce is the 25 years of experience in deploying its platform across 100s of different OEM vehicles in diverse blue collar industries with:

  1. Sensor and autonomy kit
  2. Interfaces to talk with manufacturer’s existing engines and transmissions
  3. Algorithms/AI t o take high level orchestration guidance from Mobius and fuse it with the vehicle sensing to effectively control the vehicle to achieve the high level productivity objectives

Figures 2 and 3 show examples of ASI’s fleet autonomy in action.

According to Dr. Torre: “Our customers rely on mixed fleets from multiple manufacturers. ASI’s OEM-agnostic autonomy enables them to optimize the entire operation through a single platform, simplifying deployment, training, supervision, and service”.

AIM Intelligent Machines - Planetary-Scale Earthmoving

Founded in 2021 by ex-Google and Space X employees in Seattle, it has 50 people today, whose passion is to move and level soil and minerals - for the construction, mining, disaster management and defense sectors. It recently raised $50 million with investments from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, Human Capital, Ironspring Ventures, Mantis, DCVC, and Elad Gil. The company exhibited at CES 2026, demonstrating its autonomy capabilities.

The company recently announced a strategic partnership with EARTHBRAIN, a subsidiary of Komatsu, a global powerhouse in the construction equipment business. The partnership aims to deliver autonomous construction solutions for the Japanese and U.S. markets, initially focusing on bulldozers and hydraulic excavators.

AIM’s core product is its Autonomy Kit which is composed of:

  1. Edge AI compute that runs onboard the machine to ensure non-stop operation, with or without connectivity.
  2. Rugged hardware, designed for extreme vibration, dust, heat, cold, and continuous abuse in field conditions. This includes onboard sensors that ensure safety, localization, 360° awareness (LiDAR), multiple cameras (3-4 depending on application), and mapping from all angles, even without GPS or internet connectivity.
  3. Localization in the absence of GPS is achieved with LiDAR and camera data. One of the challenges with this is that the terrain is constantly changing as operations proceed, something that AIM has developed solutions for (dynamic and real-time, adaptive localization).

The first step in the journey is to install and calibrate the hardware on customer equipment (OEM-agnostic). The next step is to survey and map the site and identify opportunities for increased safety and efficiency. Processes are established, operators are trained and hardware-software integration with the defined processes and efficiency parameters are tested. The final step is to transition the autonomy and process to the customer. A dashboard application provides remote monitoring of the operation and key metrics.

AIM-enabled machines from different manufacturers are able to work together across a shared earthmoving workflow, with autonomous and manually operated equipment able to coexist on the same site. Figure 5 illustrates AIM’s OEM-agnostic approach to fleet autonomy, giving customers flexibility across the equipment they already own.

AIM’s physical AI solutions are is built around ground engagement and terrain transformation. The system perceives changing terrain, plans toward a desired end state, and controls machines as they dig, push, load, move, and grade material, then connects those capabilities at the fleet level to automate the broader earthmoving workflow. A key point about the recent Komatsu announcement demonstrates how AIM can integrate deeply with major OEMs while providing customers a common autonomy platform across mixed fleets, retrofit and factory-fit equipment. According to Adam Sadilek, founder and CEO of AIM: “Everything comes out of the ground. Every road, house, utility line, and data center requires moving molecules of earth before it can exist. Its the same with agriculture and nutrition, mining and minerals. AIM provides its customers an ecosystem with an end-to-end automated workflow. We focus on delivering that while remaining the neutral Switzerland of this space.”

U.S. Sugar - Feeding American Families Since 1931

U.S. Sugar is a ~100-year old, Florida-based, privately-owned company that “grows food for American families” . It grows, harvests and processes sugarcane, and other fresh foods like corn, citrus and green beans, across 255,000 acres in Florida. It has large refining plants in Savannah, Georgia and Clewiston, Florida and owns a 300-mile rail transportation network. It currently employs ~2000 people. Annual revenue is estimated to be ~$1.3B. Apart from supplying sugar to food manufacturers, it also packages a portion for direct sales to consumers. The U.S. produces ~9M tons of sugar/year, ~50% comes from beets, the remaining from sugarcane. U.S. Sugar has a 13% share of the overall sugar market and 25% of the sugarcane produced variety/

Sustainability and responsible farming are one key pillar of the company’s operation. Sugar production is a rough business, sensitive to weather, and a difficult environment for humans to operate in during the growth and harvesting phase. Only ~10% of a sugarcane crop results in refined sugar. ~50% of the remainder is bagasse, the fibrous material left after sugarcane stalks are crushed to extract juice. U.S. sugar processes this into a clean burning biofuel, that powers its refining operation. According to U.S. Sugar’s web-site, a ton of bagasse produces as much energy as 50 gallons of oil, so that with a 9M ton/year sugarcane production, about 4.5M tons of bagasse produces energy equivalent to 225M gallons of oil (5M barrels). Maybe the real value in sugarcane is bagasse biofuel, the new oil?

The deployment of technology and precision agriculture from land preparation, planting and harvesting is another key operating pillar. In 2025, it signed a strategic partnership with Everglades Equipment Group, one of the nation’s leading providers of John Deere equipment and precision agriculture technology solutions. Many precision agriculture features described in a recent article are being deployed on its John Deere equipment.

As part of this agreement, ASI is working with the Everglades Equipment Group to deploy a fleet of unmanned John Deere tractors (four John Deere 8R Series tractors and one John Deere 9R Series tractor, which are traditionally manually operated), in Florida to work across its 255,000 acres. ASI’s Mobius fleet management systems orchestrates the autonomous operation, allowing a single operator to run multiple vehicles at once from a remote command center. A key advantage is the 24 hour operation - the efficiency gains are impressive - before ASI and autonomy, a 2-shift operation with a human operator was able to do ~60 acres/machine/day. With ASI, a single operator can remotely control 5 machines, and do ~ 240 acres/day, a 4X gain in productivity and machine utilization. The other key advantage with autonomy is the retention and deployment of limited available skilled personnel to other parts of the operation. ASI’s ability to retrofit older generation equipment with autonomy capabilities is another. Finally, Mobius collects operational data for U.S. Sugar and also integrates mapping data from U.S. Sugar’s aerial mapping drones during all phases of the operation.

Figure 6 shows the autonomous tractors during an operation called disking, part of the the field preparation process where the previous crop is pulled up out of the ground. Disking is required for planting a new crop for the upcoming season.

According to Scott - Scott Berden, U.S. Sugar Precision Agriculture Manager, “Partnering with ASI was the right decision for U.S. Sugar because they took the time to understand our operation and worked alongside our team to develop a system that performs in the real-world conditions we face every day. Their technology has proven to be reliable, precise and scalable, and just as importantly, their team has been a true partner as we continue to expand autonomous solutions across our operations” .

The physical AI revolution is delivering significant gains to blue-collar industries. Autonomy stacks that can retrofit moving machinery from different equipment suppliers and across these applications are critical. It is happening now, opening up a new frontier in this space.

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