Quad Cities, Iowa — Iowa’s largest manufacturing employer is buying another tech startup.
Quad Cities-based John Deere is acquiring Bear Flag Robotics for 250-million dollars. Dan Leibfried, from the Deere Intelligent Solutions Group in Urbandale, says the four-year-old California-based Bear Flag develops autonomous technology for farm equipment and has been testing it on a variety of crops.
Bear Flag’s products combine radar, lidar, and cameras connected to the cloud, allowing farmers to remotely manage the robotic tractor.
The Bear Flag deal comes four years after Deere bought Blue River Technology, another robotics company. Farmers can now buy Deere sprayers that use artificial intelligence to apply pesticides and fertilizer. It’s called “See and Spray.”
