Farming AI: Self-Driving Tractors

Oct. 4, 2022

We check out the technology behind John Deere's latest self-driving tractor.

This video is part of our TechXchange Talks series.

John Deere is looking to deliver a fully autonomous tractor to farmers for production use. In this video, I talked with Gaurav Bansal of John Deere's Blue River Technology group that worked on the machine-learning support.

The tractor combines Deere's 8R tractor that includes a GPS guidance system in addition to its artificial-intelligence (AI) system. It will initially be paired with the TruSet-enabled chisel plow (see figure). This combination can prep 325 acres in 24 hours.

The autonomous tractor can be combined with John Deere's TruSet-enabled chisel plow. This setup will prep 325 acres in 24 hours.

The tractor can be driven by a person, but also is controllable via an on-board system that can be managed using a smartphone application. The app is able to monitor the tractor's progress and present alerts when anomalies occur, such as an unknown obstruction. The system employs half-a-dozen stereo cameras to detect obstacles and recognize its surroundings.

For more in-depth coverage, check out this video Q&A on the perception technology behind the tractor from our sister publication Power & Motion. Technical Editor Sara Jensen talks with Noah Schwartz, Lead Perception Engineer at Bear Flag Robotics—a developer of autonomous technology for agriculture equipment recently acquired by John Deere.

View more videos in our TechXchange Talks series.

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About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.