Marcus Ehrlich on autonomous ground systems and the Australian regulator

Marcus Ehrlich, Managing Director of Ninox Robotics, on selling autonomous ground systems to Australian farmers, the slow patient work of getting CASA comfortable with the technology, and why the regulator was always the real customer.

Marcus Ehrlich runs Ninox Robotics out of a workshop in Western Sydney. The company builds autonomous ground systems for agricultural and defence applications, and Marcus has spent close to a decade walking the line between two customer sets that rarely overlap. He sat down with the bureau in May 2020 to talk about that work.

"The first thing you learn when you build something autonomous in this country is that the regulator is the customer before the farmer is."

The first thing you learn when you build something autonomous in this country is that the regulator is the customer before the farmer is. We had functioning hardware in 2017. We had a CASA-approved operations manual eighteen months later. That gap is the actual business.

Farmers do not buy robots. They buy outcomes. If you turn up with a thirty kilogram machine that runs a paddock at half walking pace and tells you which patches need attention, you have a product. If you turn up with a robot, you have a science project.

The defence work funds the agricultural work. We do not pretend otherwise. Defence buys patience. Agriculture buys speed. The two together pay the workshop.

Bureau Audio · Marcus Ehrlich · 8 May 2020 · Archived by Bridge Street Bureau