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In this episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast we sit down with Maximilian Hiltmair, Strategic Marketing Manager for Trimble.

On the 10^th anniversary of Trimble RTX technology, Hiltmair examines what’s next for correction services in the precision ag industry.

Hiltmair also addresses dealer concerns about autonomy, fills us in on the company’s new RTX integrity monitoring system and covers what farm equipment dealers should know about the future of RTX. 

Full Transcript

Noah Newman:

Hello, and welcome to another edition of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast. I'm your host, Noah Newman. This week, managing editor Michaela Paukner sits down with Maximilian Hiltmair, Strategic Marketing Manager for Trimble Correction Services. Maximilian fills us in on the company's new RTX Integrity monitoring system, and he also talks about what you should know about the future of RTX in general. So let's waste no more time. Jumping right in, here is Maximilian.

Maximilian Hiltmair:

So I'm leading the agriculture segment, in terms of correction services, like RTX experience now and stuff so I'm the team lead for this portion of the business. I started as an engineer in Trimble, and I pivoted to product management, and now I'm the leader there so I have a very close relationship with agriculture.

Michaela Paukner:

Do you have background in agriculture, prior to joining Trimble?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Yes and no. I grew up on farms, basically between farms, so I also have a very small [inaudible 00:01:12] farm, where I can play around with the Trimble systems, which is very helpful for me. I understand the farmers, what they are talking about. I'm still doing a lot of farming on my own, so yeah. Basically from education, I'm an Electrical Engineer on education. I did a lot of work during my study for ECHO. In Germany, there is ECHO, there is Fendt. They are one of the leading companies in terms of technology, so I could have insights into this and then I started with Trimble basically.

Michaela Paukner:

Great. I'm sure that experience working with the Trimble products on your own farm is very useful and also reassuring to Trimble's customers to know that the people making it are actually using it too.

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Yeah, one of the best characteristics of working here for Trimble is being able to use the stuff in real life scenarios, seeing the change. We are often testing stuff which is not out there, right? Seeing the change over time, that's impressive to see it on your own gear.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah, for sure. Talking about the change over time, today we're talking about the past, present and future of correction services, including Trimble RTX, which as I'm sure you know is celebrating its 10-year anniversary this year. So can you give us a short overview of the history of Trimble RTX?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

I'm not 10 years with Trimble. Basically, everything started for agriculture. This whole entire project of RTX was launched about agriculture, and way back then, we only had GPS or there was only GPS and then GLONASS was there. Over time we had more and more constellations. We started GPS and GLONASS, then we had Galileo, then QZSS, then BeiDou. Over the time, we had much more satellites to work with. At the same time, we were also able to regionalize the corrections. Basically RTX's PPP service, precise point positioning methodology. This is based on modeling ionosphere and tropospheric effects. And we started off with a global modeling and then we further regionalized it countrywide and continental. We could uncover the entire US for example, with the fast service. Also, Europe is pretty much covered and together with the positioning software we're developing, when you buy Trimble, everything comes from Trimble.

You get the corrections from Trimble, you get the positioning software and that's the unique thing that we can combine this together and adjust it. And this is really the benefit of Trimble that we, if you advance one thing, the other thing has also advancement. And if you think about the recent improvements we have with ProPoint and which is the newest technology from Trimble. The newest positioning software together with the newest advancements of Trimble RTX with adding BeiDou, we could automatically reduce the global convergence time from 20 minutes to five minutes for example. And over the last 10 years, a lot of advancement happened in this main.

Michaela Paukner:

So right now, are any farmers still using GLONASS or is that kind of obsolete now?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

We are using all available satellites.

Michaela Paukner:

Oh, okay.

Maximilian Hiltmair:

If GLONASS is available, we are using it.

Michaela Paukner:

People announced the RTX integrity monitoring system. So could you talk a little bit about what the system is and how farmers and people on ag would use it?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Sure. So if you follow Trimble, we are going our road to autonomy and automotive technology I would say. So you probably have heard about the GM super cruise, which is enabled by RTX, it's advanced driving system for [inaudible 00:05:43]. And basically we want to explore more of the path into the automotive space and therefore you need to comply with standards and requirements for the automotive customers. So the integrity system is one piece or one milestone to go to this autonomy and automotive thing. So it's basically in simple words, we need to ensure that the data, the farmer or the car gets, is reliable and it has some level of integrity and this is the whole system and the whole workflow which were designed there is to achieve this high level of integrity so that the customers assure the correction data is full proof to the requirement specifications.

And yeah, this is what we announced I think yesterday. So this is complying with a lot of automotive standards like the Easel 262 for example. These are high level, very detailed standards about what's safe, what the requirements are for safety critical. So this is now automotive farming. If you think about what we do with forge and autonomous driving and automation of tasks, this would be a key part for agriculture too. To have safety critical corrections, safety critical positions, as we are going the autonomy, as we explore higher levels of autonomy, the steps one to five and as more we go up safety critically will be more and more of importance. So we are basically preparing RTX for this journey in all kinds of areas like farming, automotive, and construction. RTX is the Trimble answer for autonomy or safety critical.

Michaela Paukner:

And then so with this integrity monitoring system, can farm equipment then safely drive on roads or are we still not quite there yet where we need the operator and the equipment to transport it?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

We are still at the beginning of completeness. I mean if you think about things like the farmer can put his attention to something different, that's still a long road to go and we are at the beginning of this journey. We are preparing ourselves, we are learning a lot with projects like [inaudible 00:08:29] and we are putting all this learning together in our next development steps. But this will take some time.

Michaela Paukner:

I think something else I wanted to ask you about was what should farm equipment dealers know about not only the RTX integrity monitoring system, but what's ahead for RTX in general?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

The biggest thing I would ask dealers to is to not fear what's coming. Autonomy is a big buzzword and autonomous driving and stuff like that can be scary because nobody knows exactly probably what the details are, what the products are. So I encourage everyone to be open and to ask questions about it. Trimble will definitely go this route of autonomous. So basically we are good at task automation at Trimble, right? If you think about the guidance systems, we can automate the task of guidance thing. We can automate to make variable rate control of the implement for example. So where we are going is we want to think more holistically about the entire workflow from the office into the farm. That's the autonomous workflow. It's everything for us and that's the road we are going and there will be a lot of things which come and I want to encourage everyone to be curious about this and be part of this process of where we get to and bring the input of what's needed from the market.

Michaela Paukner:

Yes. Yeah, and I think what have dealers told you so far about their concerns about autonomy at where we are today?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Well, I think it's more about the difference. I think there is this difference of the autonomous driving track door and what Trimble thinks about the entire... What I said from the office to the field, the entire workflow of a farm and which needs more understanding of the market of the resellers.

Michaela Paukner:

Like you said, it's just a term that is very big and broad...

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Yeah.

Michaela Paukner:

Like people just don't know how to prepare for it.

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Exactly. I think that's what you said is correct. I mean it's a big word and one could integrate in this way, one could integrate it in the other way. Yeah. So for us, it's really you want to talk about entire workflows and not only about one task. I think that's frame it. So basically if you know about the soil compactor, which Trimble launched, this is a good...You don't know it?

Michaela Paukner:

No, I don't.

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Okay, so Trimble launched an automatic steering compactor, which takes a model of the office into the cap and the steering on the compactor is done automatically so the driver doesn't have to do anything. That's a good example of how we want to connect the digital world and the physical world, and I think this is what autonomy can describe for us.

Michaela Paukner:

I guess... What feedback have you gotten from growers about what Trimble is doing with RTX and...

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Yeah. Yeah. The feedback we receive for RTX is always very, very positive meaning we are farmers which are 10 years RTX users and they have been part of the progression and the feedback is phenomenal, especially now with the New ProPoint software where we together with RTX, where we have this reduction in convergence time, but also much more robustness in the field in specific scenarios. We are far better than we have been before and the market really likes the progression and sees it in the field. That's what comes back to my farm example. I also see the progression and it's really fantastic if you've been part of this. And so we have very, very good feedback of RTX.

Michaela Paukner:

Great. And then was there anything else you wanted to talk about that I haven't asked you?

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Yeah, basically, I think we have touched on it. I mean, the progression RTX is a very important point for us and we want to make the service better and easier to consume for the customer. And it's definitely that our autonomous solution from Trimble is that we are preparing RTX for the future with the integrity you just heard about. Maybe ensure that the data we are sending out is usable and we have confidence in it. So this is our answer for autonomy and for autonomous vehicles and workflows.

Michaela Paukner:

Yeah, that's cool that the farmers who are already used and the dealers too that are familiar with RTX. This is something that they're going to just see improve upon and they're going to have that base knowledge when we start to see those higher levels of autonomy.

Maximilian Hiltmair:

Yeah, that's going to be a very interesting journey for all of us. I mean, that's a big change and with the problems the customers face, with the labor shortage, with the cost explosions and for fuel, for chemicals, for fertilizer, then we have inflation, we have supply change problems, that's all put our customer under pressure and we want to help. At the same time the customer needs to maintain the profitability to survive and all the solutions we want to provide should help them better achieve this goal. And that's the fantastic thing that what we work on has impact on the ground and we have good feedback for this. That's really, really great.

Noah Newman:

Great stuff there from M and M, Michaela and Maximilian. That'll wrap up this week's addition to the podcast. Thanks so much for listening as always. If you want to go back and listen to some older episodes, head to precision farming dealer.com. Until next time, I'm Noah Newman. Have a great day.