Self-driving tractors. Robots herding cattle and picking cotton. Drones scouting for insect pests. This isn't the latest and greatest from Silicon Valley. It's just another day at Mississippi State University, where scientists create the technology and road maps that define tomorrow's agricultural landscape.

"As the world population surpasses eight billion, we need to grow more food on a fixed amount of land with less labor, which we can do with agricultural autonomy," said Dr. Alex Thomasson, professor and head of the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS).

Agricultural autonomy automates processes like planting and harvesting to save time, labor, and money. Several Mississippi Agricultural and Forestry Experiment Station (MAFES) researchers study agricultural autonomy in row crops, livestock systems, water resources, and more.

On the research front, Thomasson leads a novel project that combines uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) with uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs). Typically, pictures taken by drones are georeferenced and calibrated to fixed ground references to help them measure field data accurately, which can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. As part of a larger project that includes the University of Nebraska, Texas A&M, and South Korea-based Kangwon National University, the team developed a UGV that carries ground references and has the capability to communicate with the UAV and position itself at multiple waypoints under the flight path, providing for accurate data with minimal labor.

In cotton, researchers are mitigating herbicide-resistant weeds by applying artificial intelligence and automated mechanical technologies to build a machine that chooses which weeds to spot spray and which weeds to till.

In a pest management project to overcome the limitations of manual insect sampling in soybeans, MAFES entomologists developed an uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) sampling platform that collects insects in a sweep net attached to the bottom of a UAV.

MSU's Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, Raspet Flight Lab, and MAFES scientist Dr. Marcus McGee, assistant clinical professor in the Department of Animal and Dairy Sciences, are investigating UGVs as a safer and more efficient means of herding dairy cows compared with traditional methods.

In a separate project, MAFES scientists have partnered with the Noble Research Institute to develop models to optimize animal production and pasture management. The team used UAVs to capture pasture images and fitted grazing steers with accelerometers to determine the net energy of grazing cattle.

Ocean water quality is increasingly important to monitor as onshore activities impact our coastal waters more. MAFES scientists, the Geosystems Research Institute, and SeaTrac Systems, Inc., have developed an uncrewed automated surface vehicle to analyze algae and other water quality factors in offshore waters across the Mississippi Sound in real time.

Thomasson said MSU is an emerging agricultural autonomy leader. He leads the MSU Agricultural Autonomy Institute, with members across MAFES, Extension Service, the Bagley College of Engineering, and multiple research centers and institutes.

"Automated agriculture is a wide-open space with MSU ready to help bring businesses to Mississippi, develop related intellectual property through research, and build a capable workforce in this new sector," Thomasson said.