CNH Industrial

CNH is a world-class equipment and services company with over 180 years of developing pioneering equipment and services for farmers and builders.

Through its various businesses, CNH Industrial designs, produces, and sells agricultural machinery and construction equipment (Case IH and New Holland brand families) striving to provide the very best machinery and technology to make the lives of farmers and builders easier and their businesses more efficient and profitable.

Present in all major markets worldwide, the company operates across 180 countries.

Challenge

CNH Industrial, a global leader in the agricultural and construction equipment sectors, is exploring innovative solutions to enhance agricultural processes through automation, particularly focusing on the pruning and harvesting stages. The company manages a diverse array of plants in unpredictable agricultural environments, making standard automation solutions inadequate. To address this, CNH is planning to use AI-guided machines/robotic arms to perform complex operations such as plant and branch identification, quality assessment, selective pruning, and precise harvesting. The challenge arises from the lack of sufficient training data to effectively instruct the internal AI models that drive these autonomous machines. Consequently, the company is looking for a software solution that can generate synthetic images (or other relevant typologies of data) in a very vast amount starting from a limited set of available images/information. This synthetic dataset will be necessary to train the internal AI models to recognize different plant types, growth stages, and respond to varying environmental conditions, thereby optimizing the automation of the pruning and harvesting operations.

Objectives

• Scouting a sophisticated software solution that creates synthetic images for different type of plants to train AI models for agricultural automation tasks.

• Looking for solutions with TRL 5 - Technology validated in relevant environment.

• CNH is interested in collaborating with startups/scaleups to co-develop a PoC or to launch pilot projects together