Autonomous Solutions (ASI)

A group of Utah State University engineers took their robotics research commercial in November 2000, and ASI’s first contract was an autonomous orchard tractor for John Deere. The company has since built vehicle autonomy systems for mining, agriculture and defense, and operates a 200-acre proving ground at Mendon, Utah alongside offices in Salt Lake City, Dallas-Fort Worth and Longmont, Colorado. In September 2026 SoftBank put $225 million into ASI and formed a joint venture aimed at autonomous heavy construction. Mining has been the proving market for two decades, where haul routes repeat and the site is closed to the public. Open construction sites are a harder problem, and that’s what the SoftBank money is buying.

One fact reframes the industry list. On May 30, 2024 the company sold its mining business unit to Epiroc, which had held a 34 percent stake since 2018, and said it would concentrate on logistics, agriculture, construction and automotive test. The current industry navigation reflects that shift: civil construction, logistics, agriculture and landscaping.

Automation here is a retrofit rather than a machine purchase. OEM-agnostic hardware kits go onto equipment a contractor already owns, centered on a Vehicle Control Unit that takes over steering, transmission, acceleration, braking and ignition. Positioning and awareness come from GPS, radios, beacons, cameras and obstacle-detection sensor arrays, and the fleet talks to a dedicated server over an RF network such as wireless mesh or LTE. Mobius runs client/server, with the heavy computation concentrated on the server and field clients connecting in remotely, so a site does not need a workstation per machine.

Mixed fleets are the normal case rather than the exception. Mobius takes dispatch information and coordinates autonomous articulated dump trucks alongside conventionally operated haul trucks, tele-operated and remote-control dozers, and excavators. One operator can supervise a large number of vehicles across more than one site, with path planning, task routing, map generation and area coverage patterns handled by the software, and Map Builder and Path Builder exposed as named modules. Safety is layered: obstacle detection, geofencing, emergency stop, proximity monitoring and vehicle health tracking.

Two product names worth knowing beyond Mobius are Scythe Sight, the AI vision system, and the M.52, both of which came in through the Scythe Robotics acquisition. On the customer and partner side the site displays Ferrexpo, Ford, Komatsu, Lockheed Martin, Rio Tinto, Sharp and Toyota, and describes OEM work with Ford, Toyota, John Deere, CASE New Holland and Komatsu, which is the practical evidence behind the OEM-agnostic positioning.

Support is split by phone extension rather than by ticket portal: sales at 866.881.2171 extension 2 or info@asirobots.com, technical support at extension 1141 or support@asirobots.com. Demos can be scheduled directly, and the resource library carries white papers, trend reports and case studies. The company has been certified as a Great Place to Work in 2025 and 2026, and points to Edison Awards and a RoboBusiness Game Changer Award among its recognitions.