Agricultural hardware maker John Deere today debuted a fully autonomous tractor at the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show.

The autonomous tractor combines the company’s 8R tractor with a TruSet-enabled chisel plow, GPS guidance system and new advanced technologies. Those technologies include six pairs of stereo cameras that enable 360-degree obstacle detection and distance calculation.

Images captured by the cameras are passed through a deep neural network that classifies each pixel in about 100 milliseconds and determines if the machine continues or stops if any obstacles are detected. The autonomous tractor also continuously checks its position relative to a geofence to ensure it’s operating where it is meant to be, so it can’t drive off into the distance accidentally.

The primary user input for the tractor is a farmer taking the machine to a field and then configuring it for autonomous operation. That configuration is done via a mobile application, with the farmer able to start the tractor by swiping from left to right. The farmer is not required to supervise the tractor once it’s in autonomous mode and can monitor the machine’s status from the mobile app.

The John Deere Operations Center Mobile app supports live video, images, data and metrics and allows the farmer to adjust settings such as speed and depth in which a field is plowed. Should anything go wrong with the tractor, the app notifies the farmer.

The company is pitching the tractor as “feeding the world,” claiming that the world population is expected to grow to 10 billion by 2050 and that food demand will increase by 50%. “Furthermore, farmers must feed this growing population with less available land and skilled labor, and work through the variables inherent in farming like changing weather conditions and climate, variations in soil quality and the presence of weeds and pests,” the company said in a statement.

This isn’t the first tractor that John Deere has offered that provides some level of automation, but it is the world’s first genuinely autonomous tractor.

As with all innovation comes ethical concerns, although, in John Deere’s case, it’s not the automation aspect of the offering, but how the company may handle data gained from the tractors. Christopher Kitts, a professor of field robotics at Santa Clara University, told Wired that the data collected by the autonomous tractors could be so useful to farmers that John Deere could charge extra to access it.

Photo: John Deere