Farming equipment maker John Deere recently announced the release of their first fully autonomous tractor.
The tractor combines Deere's 8R tractor, a chisel plow, six pairs of stereo cameras, and an AI system to perceive its environment and navigate.
Tractors with the ability to steer themselves are not new. Decades ago, I drove a tractor with an "autopilot" function that kept the tractor on a straight line during tilling and harvesting on my family's farm.
The autopilot was helpful, but the tractor still required human operators to make turns, avoid objects in their path and maintain the necessary location precision to till or harvest a field.
But the Deere tractor does all this and more by itself (see the movie below).
Autonomous tractors will reduce the need for hard-to-find farm labor and significantly increase efficiency. Farms of all sizes will no doubt quickly adopt this technology.
