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106 SMT007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2021 of successful autonomous vehicle design and operations, and Caterpillar has 40 years of AV design, manufacture, and use—all without a single fatality. ey are looking to license their technologies. CONSUMER ELECTRONICS LG Electronics LG seemed more prom- inent this year than Sam- sung, although Samsung is a much bigger com- pany. e LG presentation was opened by CEO Brian Kwon, but Jin-hong Kim, senior vice president of global marketing, did most of the narrations. Much of the early pre- sentation was a general overview of life due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but LG has developed a face recognition soware that works even with masks and can also measure face tem- • Power trains (Figure 6) • Body electronics Bosch concluded its short press conference with the announcement of a rapid COVID-19 tester called Vivalytic, that is said to test five samples in just 30 minutes. John Deere, Caterpillar Finally, I specifically joined the John Deere and Caterpillar press conferences. I favor these two because of the work I did with them while working as an automation engineer at Hewlett- Packard in the early 1980s. I discovered then that these two companies were more advanced than the military in vehicles, sensors, electron- ics, and manufacturing technologies. ey dominate the markets they work for: John Deere for agriculture and construction, and Caterpillar for mining, marine, construction and power trains (diesel-electric for trains). I discovered they were using "fly-by-wire" and GPS/laser navigation years before the military had it. eir advantage is that they do not oper- ate on public highways and they are financed by their own insurance services. Deanna Kovar, vice president of produc- tion and precision ag production systems at John Deere, explained how technology drives these machines and the modern farmer. e company has built a trac- tor capable of autonomous navigation (Figure 7) that is guided by satellite, drones and GPS to "plant every square inch of arable land with minimum seed used. Both were demonstrated at CES because John Deere has 20 years Figure 7: Deanna Kovar with John Deere's latest autonomous farm tractor. Seeds can be placed precisely within 2.5 cm, maximizing growth and optimizing available land. Figure 8: Facial recognition with temperature measurements. Brian Kwon Jin-hong Kim