John Deere has revealed its first fully autonomous tractor.

The machine combines Deere’s 8R Tractor, TruSet™-enabled chisel plow, GPS guidance system, and new advanced technologies.

South West Farmer:

The autonomous tractor is ready for production and will be available to farmers later this year.

It 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.

The autonomous tractor is also continuously checking its position relative to a geofence, ensuring it is operating where it is supposed to - and is accurate to within less than one inch.

South West Farmer:

To use the autonomous tractor, farmers need only to transport the machine to a field and configure it for autonomous operation.

Using John Deere Operations Center Mobile, they can swipe from left to right to start the machine.

While the machine is working, the farmer can leave the field to focus on other tasks while monitoring the machine’s status from their mobile device.

The mobile then provides access to live video, images, data, and metrics, and allows a farmer to adjust speed, depth, and more.

In the event of any job-quality anomalies or machine-health issues, farmers will be notified remotely and can make adjustments to improve the performance of the machine.