CES 2025 spotlights automation, electrification in power equipment
22 January 2025

Organizers for CES 2025 said in a press release that more than 141,000 attendees descended upon Las Vegas, Nev., for the trade show held during the first full week of January.
Among the more than 6,000 media attendees was Becky Schultz, editor of Power Progress and vice president of content for KHL’s power division. She said this year’s event seemed as busy if not busier than what she experienced at her first visit to CES in 2024.
“People seemed to be really excited to see the new technologies that were coming out,” she said. “It was definitely a very high-energy buzz throughout the conference.”
One thing that stood out to Schultz was the diversity of attendees visiting the booths and events related to the power and equipment industries.
“It wasn’t just people who were interested solely in the types of technologies that we normally cover,” she said. “It was people from outside of the industry coming in to check out what construction was doing, what agriculture was doing, what the on-highway commercial space was doing.”
Schultz called such broad interest a positive sign for e-mobility in general.
Autonomous Equipment
Thematically, Schultz said that among exhibitors in the sectors that Power Progress covers, electrification was featured early and often. She added that AI was often addressed as it relates to equipment connectivity and communication.
“But there were certain things that seemed to be especially of focus in the booths,” she said. “I think automation, autonomous technology, was probably one of the biggest things. Almost every manufacturer that I spoke with had some type of autonomous vehicle in their booth.”

Oshkosh Corporation, for instance, used CES as a way to introduce what it called “an interconnected jobsite ecosystem” for its JLG Industries subsidiary. This included the fully electric JLG Galileo, which combines a boom lift with a rotating telehandler, and the Autonomous Mobile Charging Robot (AMCR). The latter not only allows equipment like the JLG Galileo to charge wirelessly, but it brings charging capability to the equipment on the jobsite as it navigates autonomously via Oshkosh’s ClearSky Smart Fleet technology.
“You can either summon it manually or the machine will sense whenever it drops in charge [and] summon this machine [the AMCR],” said Tim Morris, senior vice president of sales, marketing and customer support at JLG. “Instead of taking the machine to charge, you bring the charge to the machine.”
Morris added that after charging a piece of electric equipment, the AMCR will go to a charging station to recharge and be prepared to charge another piece of equipment.
Schultz said one reason autonomy was such a focus was the skills and labor shortage many sectors are experiencing.
“I’ve been talking about it for more than a decade” she said. “But it’s getting even worse as we’re seeing more and more of the baby boomers exit the workforce. Now people are getting desperate to fill those positions. The autonomy that we’re seeing coming into the market and the potential products that were shown at CES were really intended to help show what is possible to help fill those gaps.”
Rather than eliminating jobs, Schultz said her conversations at CES led her to believe the goal of autonomy is to allow machines to perform mundane, repetitive tasks that don’t require much skill so that the companies can make better use of the limited labor pool they have available to them.
“Those are things that a lot of the ag equipment manufacturers are focusing on,” she said. “Anything that can be repetitive.”
She added, “Do you really need a skilled worker with a wheelbarrow pushing things around? Do you need a tractor and a wagon that has to have an operator on board, or can you automate those things?”
Schultz noted that John Deere’s autonomy kit for its articulated dump truck, while being a bit more complex, is an example of automating a repetitive process.
“You’re still talking about something that’s transporting materials from one place to another and then coming back to do it all again,” she said. “Those are the kind of repetitive tasks that don’t necessarily need skilled operators. They can be pre-programmed, and that’s what these autonomous solutions are all about.”
Electrification Still Growing
Compared to CES 2024, Schultz said there seemed to be more electrified concept vehicles “if not fully available products.”
“If you look at just the Oshkosh Corporation booth alone, every vehicle that was in that booth was shown as an electric configuration,” she said. “Fire truck. Refuse vehicle. Postal vehicle. Ground support equipment. Telehandler. It really was an entirely electric stand for a company like Oshkosh/JLG. I think that is really intriguing.”
Komatsu also leaned into electrification at CES 2025 with construction equipment designed for extreme environments, such as those that are underwater or even on the moon.
“Extreme environments is what we’re working for in general,” said Leah Harnack, senior manager, content and brand for Komatsu.
One piece of equipment Komatsu has electrified is a remote-controlled robot used primarily for dredging operations or shallow underwater operations for which divers were previously needed. The company showed its first battery prototype at CES. There is a diesel version that customers still use today, which has a snorkel to allow oxygen to reach the engine. The snorkel is no longer needed on the battery-electric version, so a mast for GPS is used in its place. The company said it hopes to replace that with a tether attached to a floating buoy.
All electrified components, including the robot’s 500 kW battery, are in sealed compartments and protected from water. The robot also uses an eco-friendly hydraulic fluid to mitigate damage in case of a leak while it is underwater.
Focus on Innovation
Schultz said one reason that CES continues to gain traction as an exhibition for the power and equipment sectors is because it’s a way for companies to emphasize their focus on innovation.

“They want to be able to present themselves at the forefront of the technology sphere,” she said.
In an interview with Schultz, Todd Stucke, president of Kubota Tractor and senior vice president of Kubota North America, said innovating for customers is what drove Kubota to exhibit at CES.
“It’s really to showcase that technology embedded in our equipment — that we can truly provide solutions,” he said, “[whether] it’s autonomy, autonomous machine control, hydrogen-powered engines, to See and Spray with the different technologies and companies that we bought.”
Last November, Kubota announced it had earned a “Best of Innovation” award from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which hosts the CES show, as part of the CES Innovation Awards 2025 program. The award was for the Kubota KATR, a compact, four-wheeled robot designed for hauling cargo. Kubota said the KATR has a cargo deck platform and stability control features that allow it to work in a variety of off-highway applications, including agriculture and construction.
Not Ready for Production
Given CES’ reputation as a place to introduce concepts and technology that are on the leading edge, Schultz said most manufacturers were unclear about when their concepts might go into production.

“There are some that are looking at introductions as early as later this year,” she said. “We are seeing some of this technology, primarily on the smaller end. For example, Daedong had an autonomous agricultural robot — a small machine designed for small-scale transport, spraying applications, things like that. That is something that they said that they would have available by the end of 2025.”
Large equipment with more complex technology, however, will not likely be available in production for several years, Schultz said.
“The machines now as opposed to some of this autonomous technology that is really more of a concept is still several months, if not years, from full production capability,” she said.
Schultz added, “It’s more taking elements of the technology that they’re developing and then applying it to existing machine types that they already have in the field and helping to expand their technology that way.”
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