Orvand Robotics has finished the 2026 season with nine OV90 orchard tractors working without anyone in a seat, which the company believes is the first commercial fruit-tree deployment in the United States to run a full season under remote supervision alone.
The machines mowed, sprayed, and hauled bins across almond, apple, and cherry blocks in California's Central Valley and Washington's Yakima Valley. Orvand says the fleet logged roughly 1,400 working hours, with one remote operator typically supervising four tractors from a trailer parked at the block edge.
Rows are the easy part
Driving between tree rows turns out to be the solved problem: lidar walls on both sides give the controller an unambiguous corridor. The hard parts were headland turns in soft dirt, deciding whether a dropped bin is an obstacle or debris, and knowing when a human has walked into the row behind the machine.
Orvand logged 61 interventions over the season, two-thirds of them turn-related. The company says the remaining stops were mostly conservative: the tractor halted for something it could not classify and waited for a human to look through the camera feed and release it.
“A machine that stops too often is annoying. A machine that stops too rarely ends your company. We will take annoying for another year.”
Orvand plans 40 machines for 2027 and is quoting per-acre service pricing rather than selling the tractors outright, which keeps the supervision cost on its own books.