Minn-Dak Farmers Co-op leads the way on driverless truck technology

WAHPETON, N.D. — The U.S. company that has the first driverless semi-trucks carrying full loads isn’t owned by Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. It’s owned by a bunch of farmers.

Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative

, owned by sugarbeet growers in North Dakota and Minnesota, is rolling driverless trucks this fall, hauling beets to its processing plant at Wahpeton, North Dakota.

“We are, to our knowledge, the absolute first ones to have autonomous articulated full-size semis pulling full-sized payload on public roads in the entire United States,” Mike Metzger, vice president for agriculture and research at Minn-Dak, said. “It’s not an Amazon. It’s not a UPS or FedEx. It’s little Minn-Dak Farmers Cooperative in Wahpeton, North Dakota, and that’s something we’re very proud of.”

Mike Metzger on Nov. 10, 2023, talks about the driverless truck technology being implemented by Minn-Dak Farmers Co-op in Wahpeton, North Dakota,

Minn-Dak is using technology from Florida-based military contractor

Kratos Defense

. It is a leader-follower system, with the leader truck manned by a Minn-Dak driver and another truck following and replicating its movements.

If the leader truck swerves to miss a pothole, so does the follower.

“Now, of course, the question we get is, well, ‘What if the leader truck goes in the ditch? Will the follower come right in there?’ No, I mean, these systems are so advanced that there’s geo fences on every route that we take, and that follower truck knows exactly where it is in relation to the road, its surroundings and especially to the leader truck,” Metzger said.

Loading Beets.JPG — Sugarbeets are scooped from a pile at a receiving station and loaded into a truck on Nov. 10, 2023, west of Wahpeton, North Dakota.

When sugarbeet harvest starts in August, beets go from farm fields to eight receiving stations around the two counties where Minn-Dak operates. Harvest usually wraps up by the beginning of November, but trucks move beets from those piles to the sugar refinery outside Wahpeton all through the winter and spring.

“Our fleet actually annually puts on about 2.5 million miles a year, and we don’t leave Wilkin or Richland counties,” Metzger said.

The Kratos system was designed for hauls of 200 miles or less. The longest one-way trip for Minn-Dak is under 40 miles with a very limited number of routes to travel.

Minn-Dak is putting in the system in small steps. So far, it only has permission to use the driverless trucks in North Dakota, and they are not quite driverless yet.

Minn-Dak driver Jason Heitkamp sits behind the wheel of a follower beet truck but lets the metal fingers of the Kratos system do the steering as it travels down a Richland County road on Nov. 10, 2023.

For now, a Minn-Dak driver is manning the follower truck, as they get a feel for real-world operation, but the follower is mostly hands-off.

Maynard Factor 2.JPG — Maynard Factor of Kratos Defense talks about his company’s system of automating trucks on at the Autonomous Nation coference in Fargo, North Dakota, on Aug. 29, 2023.

The trucks were already part of the Minn-Dak fleet, then driven to Florida to be outfitted with Kratos technology, including lidar.

“So we add navigation systems. We add computers. We add the communication systems, which transmit the data from the leader to the follower. We add sensors to the vehicles for situational awareness, obstacles, side obstacles, and of course, the software,” Maynard Factor of Kratos said during a presentation with Metzger at the Autonomous Nation conference in Fargo in August.

A lidar detection unit is part of the Kratos technology added to follower trucks in the autonomous driving system.

So far, Minn-Dak only has permission to use the autonomous trucks in North Dakota and with a person riding in the truck. Metzer said he is hopeful that the North Dakota Department of Transportation will allow the follower trucks to operate without an occupant yet this hauling season.

The co-op also is working with Minnesota officials.

“Minnesota is a little harder nut to crack, but we’re working on it,” Metzger said. “Currently, Kratos has a project going on with CHS and their trucks in Minnesota and are making some strides. We also continue to work with the state of Minnesota, trying to get the routes that we use from our receiving station back into the factory on the Minnesota side of the river labeled as autonomous safe routes, and hopefully we can keep moving forward.”

The following distance can be adjusted, but North Dakota officials set a standard of 300 feet between the vehicles, allowing another driver to pass one truck, then the other, instead of passing both at the same time.

“The technology allows a passenger vehicle of any sort in between those two. So the follower vehicle right now, it can be no closer than 300 feet behind the leader vehicle when operating at highway speed,” Metzger said.

Minn-Dak actually learned about the Kratos system from the North Dakota DOT. It was using Kratos technology for vehicles that would paint lines on highways, keeping a driver out of harm’s way.

“They did a leader-follower type system, but they did it with straight trucks, not articulated,” Metzger said. “We’ve simply taken the same technology to a lot more payload, a little bit higher speed and then with articulated semis.”

A platform rises to tip beets out of a truck on Nov. 10, 2023, at the Minn-Dak sugarbeet processing plant at Wahpeton, North Dakota.

The trucks can quickly be flipped from autonomous mode to conventional driving. When the leader arrives at the beet plant, the driver pulls on to a dumping platform, the load is dumped and the driver pulls away. The driver then can head to the follower truck to manually drive it up to the platform.

After dumping, the trucks can be electronically relinked, and off they go again.

Metzger likened it to auto-steer on a tractor: “The farmer will turn the corner in the field, get himself lined up and flip the auto steer on and then the tractor drives itself with sub-inch accuracy from one end of the field to the other. But going down the road or back home or from field to field or anything else, at any time that individual can take control.

“So that’s essentially what we’re doing here is these trucks can be run either in autonomous mode or in manual mode. So if we have inclement weather, fog, ice, rain, snowstorm, we don’t have to take the trucks out of service, we can simply flip them from autonomous mode into manual mode and they still remain an integral part of our fleet.”

A screen inside a follower truck displays the “fingers” that turn the steering while when it is in autonomous mode.

Linking the trucks does require a person in each vehicle, going through a checklist, including activating the “fingers” from the Kratos system that turn the steering wheel of the follower vehicle.

Part of the motivation for investing in the Kratos system is the co-op’s desire to grow.

“This technology made sense for us and gave us an ability to expand. Over the last several seasons, our growers and shareholders have made significant investments into our facility. And our facility is starting to slice more and more and gaining capacity for the number of beets or the throughput that we can run through the facility any given day,” Metzger said.

But to keep the processing plant rolling, it needs a steady diet of beets, and commercially licensed drivers are already hard to come by in a mostly rural area. The two counties Minn-Dak operates in have a combined population of about 22,000.

“So we’re not replacing jobs — we’re better utilizing the jobs that we have already,” Metzger said.

Minn-Dak also is the only sugarbeet company that owns its own fleet of trucks and directly employs drivers. It sent those drivers — now called system operators — to Florida for training with Kratos.