Last June, Agco’s PTxTrimble held a field day in Salina, Kansas, to introduce the world to its autonomous grain cart and tillage system called Outrun.
Since then, the system has seen a few changes.
“We’ve taken that system and converted it to look at it as an autonomy platform,” says Dinen Subramaniam, product launch manager for Outrun at PTx Trimble.
“So instead of a tillage and grain cart product, we’re really thinking about it as you buy one Outrun intelligent system and then you extend it for different tasks.”
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The company expects to expand its use to other field operations in the future.
At this stage, Outrun is still focused on applications using John Deere 8R tractors, and it is available in limited release for pulling a grain cart in the field this year.
In August 2025, the company expects to announce limited release of the tillage application with both uses expanding to work with Fendt 900 Series tractors as well as the Deeres.
“The tillage system and the offering for the Fendt 900 series, we’ll start beginning Farm Progress of 2025 for customer use in 2026,” says Subramaniam.
“Right now, our support is for the John Deere 8R with IVTs. We may also catch the 1000 Series (Fendt) tractors next year, but that’s up in the air.”
There have been technical changes to Outrun as a result of a year’s worth of field trials. It now uses the Nav 900 GPS and RTK system from PTx Trimble. The vehicle-to-vehicle communications system has also changed.
“Previously, the two systems communicated over an independent radio system,” he says.
“We’re now communicating over Starlink. So the two are connected, but farmers can also log in and see how things are going.”
When Outrun was first shown to the media last year, Agco executives said they expected to sell the system to farmers on a subscription basis with costs dependent on how many hours or acres each subscriber used it for. However, Subramaniam says the company has rethought that and decided to go with a more conventional subscription model with a fixed per-year fee.
“We had a usage-based model previously, but we’ve shifted our plan to a more traditional model as of this spring.
“Right now, the the hardware components will be a one-time cost, somewhere in the range of $50,000 to $60,000. Then an annual service cost of $15,000 per year. That includes correction for the receivers, satellite connection through Starlink, AI compute costs, cloud costs and everything else. There are no additional costs.”
The development of Outrun can trace its engineering origins to 2013, when some of the basic technologies were initially developed. Since then, those systems have been refined and improved. Dedicated work on the Outrun project began in 2018.
“All of that technology has come along to the point in 2018 when we started specifically working on the system,” says Subramaniam.
“We were building on top of the 90 per cent of the iceberg you don’t really see.
“It really is a relatively long story of development and team building, lessons learned, all to the point of getting this product out in a mature capacity.”
As a recognition of the engineering team’s achievement in creating the system, Outrun has garnered a few engineering awards over the past year, starting with an AE50 award from the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers in the U.S.
“We were selected for the Davidson Award out of that, and there were only three honorers,” he adds.
“And recently we were selected for the Fast Company World Changing Ideas award as well.”
While many farmers may not be aware of the significance of an engineering team raking in awards like that, Subramaniam says is makes a big difference to the people working on the project.
“It is really important. It’s a tough problem we’re tackling. From a morale point of view, it’s great for the team to be recognized that way. It’s important to recognize these awards are also focused on the story and potential, the difference (it makes) in communities and farmers’ lives around the world. I think that part is very gratifying as well.”
