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Deere & Co. has introduced a fully autonomous farm tractor.
Weeders, drones, and other automated farm tools have been around for a while (see “Automation on the Farm,” 15 May 2018 and “Robots Take the Farm Field,” 4 May 2021), but a driverless tractor has waited until now.
Not a moment too soon: farmers can spend anywhere from six to 16 hours a day in the fields during the height of plowing, planting, weeding, and harvesting seasons and virtually all complain of the difficulty of finding competent hired help, especially for seasonal work.
Deere’s self-driving tractor to the rescue: its software has been trained on more than 50 million images, helping it learn the visual difference between dry and moist soil and smooth and clodded ground, for example, and what it shouldn’t try to drive across—a tree branch fallen across its path, for example.
When its six pairs of stereo cameras see something ahead that it’s leery of, it alerts the farmer, sends a photo, and awaits instructions or the farmer’s arrival to move the obstacle.
The tractor also can signal the farmer that it’s low on fuel, that a tire is leaking air, or various other operating considerations.
Through the phone, the farmer also can monitor those kinds of data as well as control the tractor, telling it to speed up, stop, or change course, among other things.
The self-driving rig guides itself around a field by GPS after it’s been fed coordinates that establish the geographic boundaries within which it will work.
Once a human gives it a command, the tractor can even drive itself to the field it’s been assigned to till, plant, weed, or spray.
Even better, the tractor can work 24 hours a day during the height of a busy season while the farmer uses the time saved to feed livestock, repair equipment, or tend to other chores.
Although the tractor will be available to farmers this fall, Deere is still working out a retail price and business model. Because the autonomous tractor will be far more expensive than conventional ones, farmers also will be able to lease it, Deere says.
Also, the autonomous components and modules can be retrofitted onto some recent conventional Deere models.
TRENDPOST: The average age of a U.S. farmer is 55; in Europe, a third of farmers are 65 or older and only 11 percent are younger than 40.
With fewer farmers expected to feed a growing population, both at home and abroad, farm automation will quickly become not only essential, but also urgent.
Because of that urgency to keep farms productive with fewer workers, manufacturers, banks, and others involved will quickly find innovative ways to make self-operating equipment affordable while also improving the machines’ capabilities.