Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019 - 11

ENGINE
to make moves in Michigan

PARTNERSHIP DANGER AHEAD
technology can keep drivers
GROWS IN THE Derq's
out of the paths of red-light runners
HEARTLAND
BY PETE BIGELOW

A startup and an auto company join
for autonomous farming tech project
BY ALEXA ST. JOHN

an Francisco startup FarmWise may be next door to
Silicon Valley, but it looked far beyond the heart of the
tech world for potential manufacturing partners to develop prototypes of its autonomous farm robots.
It found one just outside Detroit.
FarmWise talked with Michigan Economic Development
Corp.'s PlanetM mobility initiative, which introduced the
California company to Roush, an automotive development, engineering and testing services company in Livonia, Mich.
In March the companies announced a deal to begin developing and testing FarmWise's autonomous vegetable-weeder
prototypes in the Detroit suburb. The companies' initial contract
includes developing a dozen prototypes this year, with more to
come in 2020.
FarmWise, founded in 2016, says one robot is capable of
weeding enough crops to feed a city of 400,000 residents.
Thomas Palomares, chief technology officer of FarmWise,
said in a statement that "as a technology startup, joining forces
with a large and well-respected legacy automaker is critical to
support the scale of our manufacturing plan."
In September, FarmWise announced it had raised $14.5 million
in a Series A funding round led by Calibrate Ventures. ■

San Francisco startup FarmWise and automotive company Roush
struck a deal to develop and test autonomous vegetable weeders.

ew technology installed on traffic signals could soon
help prevent collisions at intersections.
Derq, a transportation startup in Dubai, United Arab
Emirates, has melded machine-learning algorithms with
information from cameras and radar sensors attached to traffic infrastructure to detect red-light runners and other imminent hazards.
Derq's software monitors vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists and
other road users. Within two seconds after a potential conflict is
detected, signals sent to properly equipped vehicles could issue
warnings to motorists.
Derq expects to feed
analytics to transportation
departments and other
partners so they can learn
more about trouble spots.
Data on near misses can
Derq tests its technology in Detroit.
be a more useful measure
of safety than information on collisions.
"At best, crashes are a small sample size and reactionary,"
said Anthony DeFilippo, director of business development at
Derq. "We're going to something more predictive and informative of longer-term trends."
City and regional leaders believe data analytics can help reduce traffic deaths and injuries. With funding from PlanetM, the
mobility division of Michigan Economic Development Corp., Derq
has run a pilot project for the past year at Jefferson Avenue and
Randolph Street in downtown Detroit. In August, the startup announced plans for a similar project in Dublin, Ohio, where it will
work with Denso. Elsewhere, Derq has partnered with Qualcomm.
Starting in Dublin, Derq plans to gather data from intersections
and stitch it together to make safety inferences along corridors.
For example, if a driver runs a red light, the technology may be
able to alert drivers farther down the road of a potential hazard.
"That's the power of using a machine-learning approach as opposed to a rules-based one," DeFilippo said. "We're better able to
understand if they're likely to run another one."
Derq's technology is used at 10 intersections in the U.S., Dubai
and Austria. DeFilippo says the company plans to boost that to
more than 30 by year end. ■
october 2019 * shift

Shift Magazine - October 7, 2019

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