John Deere reveals fully autonomous tractor

by | Jan 7, 2022 | 5 Ag Stories, News

John Deere has revealed a fully autonomous tractor that is ready for large-scale production.

At the CES 2022 event in Las Vegas, John Deere officials said the new machine combines Deere’s 8R tractor, TruSet-enabled chisel plow, GPS guidance system, and new advanced technologies. Joe Liefer of Urbandale, Iowa is senior product manager for autonomy at John Deere. He tells IARN affiliate KIIC the autonomous tractor will be available to farmers later this fall.

?For the first time, a farmer will be able to actually step out of the tractor cab and let the job get done without them,? said Liefer. ?They can then go back to the farm and do another job. They might be climbing in the combine and let the tractor and tillage tool run, and they can manage it remotely through John Deere Operations Center Mobile.?

Liefer explains the new autonomous tractor is designed for retrofit.

?The current 8R tractor that farmers are buying today that might already be in their machine shed, they will be able to make that fully autonomous in the future,? said Liefer. ?Through a quick dealer install, they will install additional cameras that we use to help perceive the world and new software. They will take that existing tractor and make it fully autonomous. We?re not going to require farmers to go out and buy a brand-new tractor and implement combination.?

The autonomous tractor has six pairs of stereo cameras, which enables 360-degree obstacle detection and the calculation of distance. Images captured by the cameras are passed through a deep neural network that classifies each pixel in approximately 100 milliseconds and determines if the machine continues to move or stops, depending on if an obstacle is detected.

?We already have GPS and geofencing or field boundaries,? said Liefer. ?GPS will still guide the tractor through the field using all of our existing AutoTrac Turn Automation or AutoPath products, but then the cameras are the eyes that replace the farmer as they step out of the cab.?

Visit John Deere?s website for more information.