During the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022, John Deere unveiled its fully autonomous 8R Tractor which will be available to farmers later in the year. Noah Schwartz, Lead Perception Engineer at Bear Flag Robotics—a developer of autonomous technology for agriculture equipment recently acquired by John Deere—says the company leveraged a lot of its existing automation technology when developing the tractor.
Using proven, reliable technology helps to ensure safety of the machine as it moves through the field. A robust control stack for path planning as well as perception technology are also utilized to enable safe, autonomous movement. “We’ve got a lot of robust AI (artificial intelligence) and algorithms behind that to make sure the tractor has a constant feed of high-quality information about what’s going on in the environment,” says Schwartz.
He says John Deere relied on deep learning and computer vision for autonomous operation of the tractor because of the rich visualizations provided and the need to have a robust, accurate system.
For a deeper dive into some of the autonomous technology utilized in the tractor, watch Farming AI: Self-Driving Tractors from our colleagues at Electronic Design who spoke with Gaurav Bansal of John Deere's Blue River Technology group about the electronics, machine learning and other solutions used to enable fully autonomous operation of the tractor.
