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The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the largest consumer electronics event in the world. The last in-person event was 2020 where more than 4,400 exhibitors and 180,000 attendees showcased the latest consumer tech innovations in Las Vegas. 2022 was a hybrid event, with in person talks as well as a digital platform. In this subscriber-only article, the IDTechEx mobility team covers mobility trends from the digital platform.

Key themes and insights in the world of agricultural robotics

John Deere has revealed a fully autonomous tractor that's ready for large-scale production. The machine combines Deere's 8R tractor, TruSet-enabled chisel plow, GPS guidance system, and new advanced technologies. The autonomous tractor will be available to farmers later this year.

No longer just a dream of vegetarians and vegans, fake meat is becoming more widely available in grocery stores and restaurants. And more options are almost certainly on the way. One team has developed a new combination of plant-based ingredients tailored for 3D printing meat alternatives. Their most successful recipes required an odd-sounding addition: cocoa butter, derived from cocoa beans of chocolate fame.

Inspired by the natural dexterity of the human hand, a team of engineers has created a reconfigurable hybrid robotics system that is able to grip a variety of objects: from the small, soft and delicate to the large, heavy and bulky. This technology is expected to impact a range of industries, involving food assembly, vertical farming and fast-moving consumer goods packaging, which will progressively automate more of their operations in the coming years.

Semiconductors are moving away from rigid substrates, which are cut or formed into thin discs or wafers, to more flexible plastic material and even paper thanks to new material and fabrication discoveries. The trend toward more flexible substrates has led to fabrication of numerous devices, from light-emitting diodes to solar cells and transistors.

Across a vast array of robotic hands and clamps, there is a common foe: the heirloom tomato. You may have seen a robotic gripper deftly pluck an egg or smoothly palm a basketball - but, unlike human hands, one gripper is unlikely to be able to do both and a key challenge remains hidden in the middle ground.

To further improve animal husbandry and livestock management, there is an urgent need to continuously collect phenotype data from individual animals. Researchers have devised a methodology that can recognize Holstein cows in the milking station by the pattern of their coat using artificial intelligence.

Developing and installing sensors that accurately measure the amount of feed in the silos in each pig farm and designing algorithms that can achieve a more efficient distribution of feed from production plants to each farm. The study was carried out on some 500 silos on farms in the province of Girona, Spain, as well as in Wales, on the Swedish island of Gotland and in the area surrounding Manchester, England.

Scientists have used gene editing technology to create female-only and male-only mice litters with 100% efficiency.