Agricultural equipment maker John Deere has announced its latest piece of autonomous farming kit: a package of hardware and software that combines machine learning with the company’s GPS-powered auto-steer features to create a “fully autonomous tractor.”
The technology to support autonomous farming has been developing rapidly in recent years, but John Deere claims this is a significant step forward. With this technology, farmers will not only be able to take their hands off the wheel of their tractor or leave the cab — they’ll be able to leave the field altogether, letting the equipment do the work without them while monitoring things remotely using their smartphone.
“This is not a demo. It’s not a concept machine. It’s something we’ve had in the field with farmers for years and will be taking to production in fall,” Deanna Kovar, vice president of production and precision ag production systems at John Deere, told The Verge.
This may seem like an unexpected breakthrough, but the farming world has arguably made more consistent progress with autonomous driving than automakers or tech startups, mostly due to the simplicity of the task at hand. Although plowing or seeding a field is certainly a difficult job — requiring farmers to navigate the contours of their land while operating complicated equipment — the driving component is relatively straightforward: operators follow set lines without having to worry about pedestrians or other road users.
Because of this, companies like John Deere have been able to automate many aspects of farm driving over the past decades. Mostly, they offer auto-steer systems which use GPS to locate and guide tractors. Farmers first map the boundaries of their fields, often using beacons or by driving around the perimeter, and the software then plots a route. The driver — sitting in the cab of their tractor — can then oversee this path and correct it if necessary.
“We’re not going from no tech all the way up to an autonomous machine,” says Kovar. “John Deere’s AutoTrac solution has taken the job of steering in the field out of the operators’ hands for almost 20 years now.” Today’s announcement, she says, builds on these solutions.
The big difference with this new technology is that drivers will now be able to set-and-forget some aspects of their self-driving tractors. The company’s autonomy kit includes six pairs of stereo cameras that capture a 360-degree view around the tractor. This input is then analyzed by machine vision algorithms, which spot unexpected obstacles.
“All [farmers] need to do is transport [their tractor] to the field, get it set, get out the cab, and use their mobile phone to ‘swipe to farm,’” says Kovar. “And every eight hours, they return to give it fuel and move it from field to field.
