Fully Autonomous 8R tractor Released by John Deere

John Deere announced the release of the fully autonomous 8R tractor, which will be deployed in late 2022, helping millions of farmers save time and utilize the same for other activities.

FREMONT, CA:For the past 20 years, John Deere tractors have been equipped with some automated features, but the company has now introduced a fully automated tractor ready for large-scale production and will go on sale in the fall. Fully autonomous means that a farmer can bring the tractor to a field and configure it for autonomous operation using a mobile app to start the equipment and watch its operation as it moves up and down the field. In contrast, the farmer can perform and handle other activities. The farmer only needs to be present to refuel the tractor or respond to the scene if the equipment cannot navigate an unanticipated obstacle.

Moreover, the farmer can even leave the field to perform the various tasks of running a farm while the machine is plowing or planting. This week, the tractor will display at a CES 2022 booth. In an interview, Deanna Kovar, vice president of Deere's production and precision agriculture production systems, told Fierce Electronics that this equipment is not for demonstration but real work in real farm fields and with real clients. A video of the Deere 8R tractor towing a Truset-enabled chisel plow as it tilled soil after harvesting it and preparing it for the next season's crops was presented by Deere. A GPS guidance system aids in the creation of a geofence that keeps the tractor on course to within an inch. The tractor also consists of six pairs of stereo cameras for distance calculation and 360-degree obstacle identification. Images from the cameras are routed via a deep neural network using two Nvidia Jetson GPUs, which help identify each image in 100 milliseconds to determine whether the machine should continue or stop when it encounters an obstacle.