EarthSense, Inc.

Here's how ground autonomy in agriculture works. For context, I'm sharing a video of our TerraMax robot navigating autonomously in oil palm. We are visualizing neural network detections, lane detection, and the robot's map of its surroundings. Deploying autonomous agricultural robots is hard. It requires dealing with rough terrain and a lack of existing datasets. But there's a simple framework we follow at EarthSense, Inc. to break it down. Solving autonomy in row crops like corn & oil palm requires stacking together the following solutions. 1. 🛣️ Straight Line Navigation Whether you're monitoring plants, spraying pesticides, or spreading fertilizer, you need to traverse the rows. Your perception needs to find the middle to drive towards, and the danger zones to avoid on each side. Your high level controller needs to find a path towards the middle. 2. ↪️ Lane Turning Straight Line gets you the row. Lane Turning completes the field. Your perception needs to find where the current row ends, where the next row starts, and build a map of the turn. Then you need to find the optimal path forward, balancing traversability, safety, and speed concerns. 3. 🚶➡️ Obstacle Detection & Avoidance You need to keep both the robot and field workers safe. Your perception needs to find objects and regions of interest in your environment, and avoid them. If they get too close, the robot must stop entirely. 🏁 Once you stack up these solutions, you have an autonomous robot. Autonomy is never easy. But a good framework makes it possible. Follow for more deep dives into agricultural robotics and field autonomy. #AI #AgricultureRobots #Robots #Autonomy

I created a 3D digital twin of a palm tree, just with a video on my phone. As a roboticist, my true purpose isn't building robots: It's making a positive difference in the world. It's easy to focus too much on what the current robot is supposed to do right now. But the work isn't over until something important is fundamentally transformed for the better. As EarthSense, Inc. deployed TerraMax to autonomously fertilize oil palm, we kept our eyes open for other ways to improve the sustainability of this industry. With our 3D digital twinning technology, we can provide precise insights to farmers and agronomists on an unprecedented scale.   🍇 Fruit bunches can easily be counted and classified for every tree we see. 🌴 Phenotypic traits of the trees, including trunk dimensions and frond angle, can be provided to agronomists. 🦠 Diseases can be detected before they infect a whole plantation. Deploying the robot is only the beginning. Next stop, changing the world! How can you foresee this technology transforming what you do? Comment below! #Robotics #AI #DigitalTwin #OilPalm #Sustainability

This is what 100 hectares of autonomous robot deployment in the real world looks like. I joined EarthSense, Inc. six years ago expecting to work on AI and autonomy. I got what I was looking for. But bringing robots out of the lab and into the real world needs more than just intelligence. Our TerraMax robot drives autonomously through oil palm fields, spreading a precise dosage to each tree. No tree, no spreading. This maximizes plant health and minimizes wastage. But the operational layer is where things really get interesting. Map generation and mission planning ensures field time is optimized. Long-range teleoperation enables safe passage through rough terrain. And at the end of the day, the farmer gets a map of all the trees the robot covered. Fast forward to today. We just completed our first hundred hectares with TerraMax, and we're scaling up to thousands this year. What have you learned from bringing robots to the real world? Share your story below! #AI #Robotics #AgTech #OilPalm #SustainablePalm

Four months ago, TerraMax was just a metal chassis. Today, it's autonomously fertilizing production oil palm. EarthSense, Inc.'s TerraMax applies a precise fertilize dose to each tree, row after row, as far as the eye can see. But what is the impact of this? Oil palm growers are under constant pressure. Fertilizer costs are high. Labor is scarce and inconsistent. Applying the right amount to the right tree, at the right time, is hard to do at scale. Precision fertilization changes that. It reduces waste, improves yields, and ensures nutrients actually reach the trees that need them. But doing this accurately across thousands of hectares has never been practical. Until now. I remember the first day we deployed TerraMax in the real world. After years of development, it was mesmerizing to see our system running like clockwork. TerraMax will fertilize thousands of hectares in 2026. Excited to be a part of this mission! #Robotics #AI #OilPalm #SustainablePalm #Sustainability

You'd have to be wired differently to join a robotics startup. Robotics isn't just "hard". It's hard at multiple levels at once: mechanical design, manufacturing, electronics, software, autonomy, and AI. I've been at EarthSense, Inc. for six years. I’ve watched prototypes take a year to build, only for plans to change when customers pause spending. I’ve also watched better-funded teams fail while building “only” software. Today we're in the strongest position we've ever been: a battle-tested product, real deployments, and we're entering scale mode. For years, several of us have been traveling to Malaysia to get our TerraMax robot deployed in oil palm. I moved here five months ago to lead the development on the ground and establish a permanent presence. Some teams struggle with motivation. Our problem is the opposite. More than once I had to pull people away from the robot well past midnight. Now we're entering a new phase. The priority is replacing heroics with systems, making late nights in the field the exception, not the operating model. 2026 is about scale: execution, reliability, and repeatability. It’s exciting to enter this new chapter. For those who have scaled robotics from “works” to “ships”: what did you change first? Manufacturing/QA, field ops/service, or the engineering process? Shout out to Akshay ., Syed Faraaz Alam, and Janice Saldanha who were working late on our robot in the image shared below. #StartupLife #Robotics #AI #AgTech #OilPalm

Autonomy + per-tree precision + real deployment conditions. TerraMax just delivered all three at scale. Here's TerraMax applying our SmartSpread™ algorithm in production oil palm: last week we demonstrated autonomous fertilization across 100 hectares, navigating ~75 km of field rows. As the robot moves down each row, perception identifies each tree and the system delivers a precise, per-tree fertilizer dose to the right location. Why this matters: higher efficiency on existing farmland, less fertilizer waste, improving field working conditions, and less pressure to expand acreage. Next: deploying across thousands of hectares in 2026, then expanding further in 2027 and beyond. #PrecisionAgriculture #Robotics #AI #Autonomy #OilPalm

The EarthSense, Inc. team hit a milestone I’m proud of. Last week, our #TerraMax robot completed autonomous fertilization across 100 hectares (1 km²) of oil palm. This didn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of years of field work, plenty of trips back to the drawing board, and an obsession with reliability. Huge credit to Joshua Burdine, Josie Suter, Krishna limbad, Akshay Kumar, Syed Faraaz Alam, Akshay ., Janice Saldanha and many others who built and supported this. A bunch of them came out to see the first 100 hectares on the ground here in Malaysia, which made it even more meaningful. Now the focus shifts to scaling: thousands of hectares in 2026, then we keep raising the bar. Sharing a couple before/after shots of the crew after two weeks in the heat, plus one from the field. This is what real-world robotics looks like when it’s working: safe, reliable, and useful. #Robotics #Autonomy #AI #OilPalm #SustainableProsperity

Vision odometry in palm fields, powering just under a kilometer of autonomy. Here's a visualization of feature extraction and localization. Stereo vision powered by a Stereolabs ZED camera. A series of row traversals and lane turns in oil palm. A precise odometry algorithm pieces it all together, helping TerraMax to keep to the center, and avoid dangerous obstacles. With an autonomy stack powered by vision and AI, TerraMax is the state of the art for autonomous field opereations in oil palm. TerraMax will fertilize thousands of hectares of oil palm in 2026, and many more beyond that. Excited to be a part of this journey with the EarthSense, Inc. team! #AI #OilPalm #Robotics #Autonomy #AgTech