Transcript
Speaker: Hello everyone. My name is Steven Kilgore, managing editor of Feeding Grain and host of the Feeding Grain podcast. Today, my guest is Chad Johnson, Chief Executive Officer at Grain Weevil Corporation. Chad is here to talk about a grain bin robot being developed by his company that will hopefully someday soon eliminate the need for producers and grain professionals to enter field grain bins. It's a really interesting technology that hopefully soon could change the industry for the better.
Speaker: Before I get to that conversation, some housekeeping notes. If you're listening to this podcast within a podcast app, please consider subscribing and or leaving a review. If you have an idea for a topic you would like me to cover or someone in the animal feed, grain handling, or related industries you'd like me to talk to, reach out and let me know. This podcast page on feedinggrain .com has a button right under the title that will let you send an email directly to me where you can give me all your suggestions. I'd love to hear from you anytime.
Speaker: With that out of the way, hi Chad. Thank you again for talking to me today. Can you just tell me a little bit about yourself, who you are and how you got into the industry? My name is Chad Johnson and I'm the CEO of the Grain Weevil Corporation. And we're actually a father -son robotics company that builds a grain bin safety and management robot. It's a very cool robot that we'll talk a lot about, but you're a father -son company. How did you kind of first get this idea to make a
Speaker: brain being robot. We were actually giving students all across the state of Nebraska opportunities to learn workforce skills through innovation. In my previous job, just so happened that my son Ben was our guinea pig. So he got to do a lot of activities and challenges around that thought process. He was getting ready to go into electrical engineering.
Speaker: at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. So we were just trying to give him opportunities to learn workforce skills. He started building a robot platform for a completely random other purpose actually for a startup in Chicago. And he built this really cool robot that could follow any colored shirt like through a factory as they were capturing video about workflow efficiency and those kind of things.
Speaker: So you got that built this freshman year in college and a local farmer saw it. And one of our family friends and he saw that robot. He said, man, if you can build that thing, build me one to keep me and my kids out of a grain bin. That's how it started. It was a challenge from a local farmer. My son and I had never been inside of a grain bin before we started, which has been actually a tremendous help for us.
Speaker: is we've made absolutely no assumptions. We don't know enough about grain to make assumptions. So it's hundreds upon hundreds of interviews and talking to farmers and getting feedback about how to build this machine. So it's something that our mission has become no boots in the grain. That is our goal is that no one ever has to stick their boots in the grain to solve a problem or to maintain best practices of
Speaker: And so that's what the challenge has been, is to build that machine so people can stay safe. Yeah, that's insane that you kind of came at it from this outsider's perspective, right? Which is always nice, especially since you have your own expertise to bring in. But you said you interviewed a bunch of people. Do you kind of figure out what the conditions were like and what the industry needed then?
Speaker: How'd you go about that? Did you just go up to your local farmers and kind of be like, Hey, what's going on? Can I talk to you about bin safety? How did that work? First of all, the farmer and the families that challenged us are probably the best resource that any ag tech company could ever have. They early adopters, they challenge you. They try new things. They're willing to let us test them. It's been great. They were really that first initial
Speaker: push for us, probably the coolest piece of our customer discovery. The Saturday that the robot drove for the very first time in March of 2020, we have a neighbor's patent on it. So we ran home to the grand bins, got our neighbor to help us write our provisional patent, submitted it on Monday. On Tuesday, there was the showing of the local movie theater of the silo film.
Speaker: And if that's that film about someone dying in a gray band and the rescue of the young man that tried to save the older gentlemen, it's just really, really powerful. And our local parent marriage association was hosting that movie. So there were hundreds of people there, farm families. We had a little table out front with this really ugly 3d printed duct tape together robot and a little video of it working for the first time.
Speaker: And that's all, it was like 15 seconds of this thing going up and coming back. Had a whiteboard, sticky notes, and we just sat out there in the lobby, very emotional movie, people coming out and saying, man, can it do this? Can it do that? You ought to make it do this. So we got hundreds of little sticky notes and questions, but someone actually took a little, with their phone, a video, a Mars video.
Speaker: Put it on Twitter at 80 ,000 views in about two weeks and a couple of hundred direct messages saying, Hey, what can this thing do? We're interested. That's when we knew it was a business. So that's how that really started was just throwing it out there and saying, what can this do for you? That was how it started. And we just continued to have tests and trials and do something. We go down and say, Hey, we just did this. So what, how can it help?
Speaker: And like I said, hundreds of farmers are just more than willing to tell us, you know, this is the way I do it. Oh, this is the way I do. Well, that thing's not going to work because you can't do this. Or it's just been wonderful to have the support and the feedback from the local farmers, from the grain industry all the way through the whole chain has been interested in helping us. So it's been great. Yeah.
Speaker: heard of you last year at the Jeeps exchange where you guys went up and you presented the video and you kind of talked about it which it's very exciting because it's so feels so futuristic because well number one a lot of people are still using you a long pole to go in there and jab at grains and stuff and then even in a lot about lowering something into the grain that whips it around so to actually have something in there that you can
Speaker: seeing and control and it just feels a little bit like finally we're going into the future. Brain conditioning technology. So that's really awesome. Can you tell me a little bit just about how it works, what it does once it's in the bin? Sure. So started out legally trying to solve a problem to take care of anomalies, right? Crust, ridges, pillars that are stuck. So to do that,
Speaker: We went through, like I said, we never worked in the grain industry, so made a lot of, I don't know, our original thoughts and processes. Hey, let's build a little remote control snowmobile type thing. Paddle wheels are off. It's like now that you look at it and say, oh yeah, augers. The most likely reason that you use an auger is to move grain. So if you want to build a robot that moves grain, how to use augers.
Speaker: Yeah, it took us a little while to get there. But once we kind of made that discovery, so we have two augers, so you think of it like a tank. But they're augers instead of treads. And those augers both propel the robot on the surface of the grain, and it manipulates the ground at the same time. So instead of building a great big giant machine that can do a lot of work, we build a small, compact, powerful machine that actually tries to take advantage of gravity
Speaker: So we run on that surface really, if we're going to level a grain bin, we're trying to get gravity to do most of the work. So that's where the intelligence of this machine comes into play, is we're running the right patterns on the surface so that the grain settles into a state of being level. The power comes in when you run into wet grain or crested grain, and we can break that up and get it to flow again.
Speaker: So so that was the initial process and then we realized they can do a lot more than that. So it can run on flow. So as you're filling the grain bins up, it cannot visit spreader in it prepared layer by layer. So you have the best airflow to help maintain grain quality. We can run when you're pulling it off so that you can push those big sidewalls down so you don't have the risk of the avalanches makes the extraction process a lot more efficient and a lot safer.
Speaker: Well, I imagine it also helps keep your grain bin a lot cleaner because that's the stuff that's hard to get to once you have a completely empty bin and you're up there trying to get the things off the wall and all that. If you can eliminate that as it's going down, that's just the benefit. And also don't count yourself. Who would have thought that augers would make good propellers? Then we started looking, there's actually a bunch of like big military tanks.
Speaker: with these great big screw drive systems that float across in swamps and all these things back from the 50s. And there's, you know, like we didn't invent the screw drive propulsion. Just, we got lucky enough to put two and two together and build a machine that can maneuver on the grain, which is very unique. So, yeah.
Speaker: It's been out there before, but you'd think that that would be the first thing people would think of us. Hell yeah, let's use augers. I can tell you right now, you could have put me in that design booth for 50 years. I would've never thought of that. So then someone is truly remotely from outside, correct? And then it has patterns that you can kind of be like, oh, I want to do this zigzag pattern, goes in and it'll start kind of moving that as you operating it. Today, yes. So today we have what we call.
Speaker: a human controlled automation. So we could put the robot in, we have a camera system, we're outside, we're controlling the robot, but then we can activate PAD. And that's the way that operates now. Very soon, it will be supervised autonomy, which means it's mostly autonomous, but we still need humans to kind of make sure it's not getting somewhere that it shouldn't. It just takes such a long time to overcome the
Speaker: fluid dynamics of grain and the hazards and the dust. And so we still have to kind of ensure that the robot's doing what it's supposed to do. And then eventually it'll be 100 % autonomous. You throw it in, tap the task that you wanted to do on your phone and then go watch football. So there's a couple of little phases in there, but right now, human controlled with autonomous capabilities, very soon,
Speaker: It's mostly autonomous with human oversight. And then it'll be fully autonomous. And that's when it's going to make the big difference on workflows. I don't have to allocate time to do these tasks, just let it happen. So that's the exciting. Well, I mean, you guys have already come so far. Because what did you say it was in 2020 that you had your first successful test? And when did you start working on the project in general?
Speaker: So it was really the summer of 2019, but Benjamin was still in college and not home. So it would just be on a weekend or I'd go to Omaha and we work in his little apartment kitchen. He'd come home with our workshop here at the house. So we just tinkered on it for a while. Like I said, we tried a couple of not so successful tests. December was the first time we tried to do an augur -based
Speaker: robot. And we made three auger based robots that did not work, which is actually if you come to our facility in Omaha, all of them are up on the wall. And there's there's three of them that didn't work. And then the one in March of 2020 was the first one that actually could function drive turn move grain. So that was very exciting. Well, people don't realize how different green is environment of a green bin is the difference.
Speaker: Like you said, there's dust you have to worry about. There's the moving potential for, I imagine the robot to get buried in grain. Does it just dig itself out at that point? How does that work? It does dig itself out up to a certain point. Yeah. Obviously, if you're 40 feet under grain, the pressures are tremendous, but it's interesting because we like to joke around a little bit about grain bins are no place for humans or robots. I mean, it is.
Speaker: a hostile environment. We've measured ambient air temperatures of 120 degrees. Grain temperatures vary so much. We've got to operate like now when it's cold outside. So you've got the dust. And then think of the grain as a fluid. It kind of sticks where it's here, but then once we start moving on, it starts flowing like a fluid.
Speaker: So that makes it extremely challenging to do autonomous code and to do, you know, making sure we know where we're at inside of the green bin. It's not like Arumba. They have reference points. When they knew how far they traveled forward and then they can check the Wi -Fi, you know, our location in the green bin is a completely custom designed technology. No GPS signals like those outdoor tractors get to use.
Speaker: This environment is tough to design machines around. So it's fun, it's exciting, but it's a difficult challenge. You're going to produce our farmer clientele too. There's a lot of variation in the bins that are out there.
Speaker: It's not like a grain elevator where their entire job is basically keeping that grain in good condition. And that's what they do. So yeah, I imagine it's a huge challenge. I know it's silly. It's almost like you're designing a robot for another planet, but how is production going? What phase of testing are you guys at now? We have some active on the farm trials. Um, and we're able to do on the farm trials because grain bins are classified as hazardous locations at commercial facilities.
Speaker: It is safe for us to test and operate on the farm because of the ventilation and all of the things that we can do there. So we have some on the farm trials. We are working on two commercial facility trials where we can go in and do some testing on commercial scale, but very limited on that front because of the hazardous certification process. We are at the last of our prototyping machine. In January, we will have our first work on our pre -production machine.
Speaker: And those are gonna be the machines that we start the certification process with to make sure that we can operate in a class two division one dust explosion environment. Our robot is safe designed with spark free motors and our batteries are super safe and all of them are safe. It's just a matter of now putting the final package together and getting those listings from the testing labs that say that we are dustproof and ignition proof. And then we can go all
Speaker: into all the commercial facilities and start doing our real testing that our biggest challenge is not can we level grain, can we break up crust. It's can our machine operate within the workflows of the commercial facilities, of the processing plant, of the farms and building it out so that it does that. As an industry, we're pretty aware of the regulatory hurdles that everything has to go through. But yeah, that's amazing. I'm looking forward to
Speaker: going to a grain facility one day and seeing it over there in the corner and being like, hey, the grain weevil, I know about that. I'm sure it will take off because like I said, it's just so much more advanced than anything I've seen in the industry that I've been covering. So really cool, really cool project. Make sure you keep us informed on as it progresses. Is there anything else you'd like to tell our visitors? Is there any way they can help? Should they just kind of sit there and wait? Is there a newsletter they can sign up for? What's going on?
Speaker: You can follow us on social media. Just a fair note, all of the tick -tock accounts where there's like 60 some million views and all those things are not ours. We got a, we got a, the super fan page is one of the teenage boys at the farm. We test that post videos and stuff every once in a while. But Twitter, we do have an official Twitter account. It's grain underscore weevil.
Speaker: and you could follow us there. But yeah, we do have surveys and newsletters that you can sign up for on our website. We do try to post a lot of videos of what we're working on. For example, it's, hey, we just hear the video of us leveling a grain bin that's 22 % moisture corn. And then get feedback on it. How does that impact your operation? What are the challenges? What do you guys know about this so that we can help CE
Speaker: how to fine tune our machine to make the best return on investment for everyone that might be able to use it. Yeah, that's awesome. And I will make sure all that gets linked in the show notes below. So you should click over and follow them if you're on Twitter and sign up for the newsletter. Everyone has an email, right? So you should please be doing that. Well, thank you so much for talking to me today, Chad. And I hope to hear from you really soon. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.
Speaker: And thank all of you out there for listening. I hope you enjoyed the podcast and I hope you'll be back for the next one. Until then, be safe out there.
