AUTONOMOUS 2026
John Macdonald
Head of AI
BONSAI ROBOTICS
John Macdonald is the Head of AI at Bonsai Robotics. Convinced of the potential of robotics from a young age, he started in competitive robotics in grade school and hasn’t looked back. Previously, he worked on deep learning-based obstacle avoidance and 3D reconstruction at Skydio. Before that, he worked on autonomous organic crop navigation & monitoring at Carnegie Mellon University. John holds an M.S. in Robotic Systems Development from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Cornell University.
Their session
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The Robot Harvest: Autonomy Comes to the Farm
A labor crisis, GPS-denied dust, and thin margins: why the farm is one of the toughest and most real proving grounds for autonomy.