At CES 2022, one would not expect to see an agriculture-focused company, yet John Deere finds an apt presence within the tech space. Over several decades, the company has expanded upon technologies for farmers to conduct their work better.
Thus, Deere excitedly reveals how autonomy will be the future of agriculture via their forthcoming autonomous 8R tractor, which will be used for tillage, seeding, and even data collation.
With it, the company hopes to amend the three main challenges farmers are currently facing with labor shortages, quality consistency, and the time it takes to perform certain duties. With 80% of the US population living in urban areas and the average age of the farmer being 55, tech is no sooner a dominant force for agricultural needs.
Deanna Kovar, VP of production, posits that said technology is a necessity in the field.
Autonomy will allow farmers to focus on other necessities, such as daily family life and data processing.
The autonomous tractor is considered much like a giant robot. It utilizes AI machine learning, real-time data sharing, and various redundant safety systems. With its RGBD, that's "red, green, blue, and depth' vision system, the tractor, aided by Nvidia processors, professionally works the field with ideally only one hand on the phone.
The autonomous tractor also utilizes a sophisticated anomaly detection system to skirt potential issues on the field, which stops the vehicle when encountering unknown objects.
Data is collected via the tractor's computer vision model, which focuses on how well the jobs on the field are done.
The data is then stored in the John Deere operation center so farmers can proactively study the data for improved overall performance and smarter long-term decisions.
Farmers can access the tractor remotely via a mobile app, which can track the quality of a current job and make adjustments accordingly. To start the vehicle, a farmer swipes left to right on the John Deere Operations App, and it goes.
The tractor is ready for production and will be released later this year but faces potential struggles with more traditional farmers who don't want the upgrade.
Despite the pushback, John Deere expects autonomy on the farm to assist via three key benefits: timeliness, efficiency, and quality of life improvement.
