depending on how many times they've seen it.

When they're younger, they get very curious about the robot.

They'll just get very, very close and peck at it,

which is fine for the robot, fine for the birds.

I have a robotics background and grew up in the Midwest,

always liked farming.

Thinking through where could a robot

really fit in and help?

I met up with turkey farmers that said,

"Yes, please do this."

We thought, "We can do robots, let's do this robot."

Adam Gettings: So, Red Wing is one of the earliest towns

in Minnesota.

It was a river town that was the last stop on the river.

So it developed really early and had a lot of industry.

But they're very old companies. So the question is,

"How do we produce another one of those companies

every 10 to 20 years?"

Red Wing Ignite is a community center

that's focused on innovation.

We hosted an ag-tech challenge last year.

You know, we invited

people within the region to come down

and pitch their best ag idea.

Kilian: Most ag-tech approaches

innovation from the biological side.

That's not my skillset.

It seemed like there was a lot of opportunity

for modernization and new technology in the space.

I ended up submitting the

poultry house robot idea

and winning first place,

which gave me enough money to

buy a robot and actually start testing

and working with local farmers.

John Zimmerman: When someone comes up with an idea

or wants to try something new,

I'm usually pretty open

to letting them work on it.

So, there's lots of uses for this robot.

The primary need now is just, there's a shortage of labor,

and having an extra set of eyes and ears,

whether they're human or artificially intelligent

eyes and ears on the farm, could be of great value

to let our human employees concentrate

on what they can do best

and let the robot concentrate

on some of the more menial tasks.

Kilian: Yeah, so a farmer would typically use the robot

checking in, like in an email or something.

The robot will say, hey, I patrolled early in the morning,

this is what I found. Here's a map of the barn,

and here's where I found any issues in the barn.

If you have six poultry barns, that's an hour of your day

just going in and out of barns.

So it'll allow them to prioritize

which barns they check in what order.

Yeah, right now, we're developing the actual mechanisms

to accomplish the physical tasks we want the robot to do.

It can turn in place, it has good traction.

As it drives around in the barn, it can turn the litter,

which improves litter condition,

which improves the health of the birds.

There's localization devices

so the robot knows where it is in the barn.

Several different types of cameras

so the robot can see everything,

and even thermal imaging

for detecting if a bird has a fever.

If a human can drive the robot around in the barn remotely

and do what we want it to do,

then we can probably train a neural network

or some other machine-learning system to control the robot.

The robot is essentially just another IoT device

that's connected with a bunch of other sensors in the barn.

Getting internet access at poultry barns

has been a real challenge, but it is really

the enabling factor to be able to build a robot

out in a rural community quickly.

Neela Mollgaard: Before you can be a smart city,

you have to have smart infrastructure.

Obviously, broadband would be the first

of that infrastructure that's needed.

Red Wing was forward-thinking, and they implemented

gigabit broadband a handful of years ago.

So, as a town of 16,000, we have gigabit broadband.

Once we have that foundation in place,

we can discover new technologies.

Gettings: The first component is making sure that we have

our technology base available

to the people who want to use it.

But there's a second piece,

which is around activating the entrepreneurs,

encouraging them to take risks,

systematizing how they do it.

This is not the kind of support you're going to get

in Silicon Valley.

Mollgaard: The model in rural communities

has to be different.

In urban settings, you have the density that you need.

You have the people, talent, and resources needed

to have those collisions of new, innovative ideas.

In rural communities, you have to force that density.

You have to bring people together, thought leaders together,

students together, technologists together,

and really try to solve problems using technology.

Kilian: They gave us the connections we needed.

They connected us with the farmers themselves,

who helped really prioritize,

what should this robot actually do for these people?

The birds are healthier, the farmer's happier,

we are years ahead of where we could have hoped to be

without them.