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The next time you pass a farm tractor tilling a field, check to make sure there’s somebody in the cab. Chances are, there won’t be.
Today at CES, John Deere announced a host of new fully autonomous vehicles that it says will revolutionize farming, landscaping, and construction. Among the new vehicles the company will have to show off are an autonomous tractor, a robot lawn mower, a crewless dump truck, and another driverless tractor, but this one designed specifically for orchards.
“We’re taking our tech stack, which is nearly three decades in the making, and we’re extending it to more of our machines to safely run autonomously in these unique and complex environments that our customers work in every day,” said Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere.
“When we talk about autonomy, we mean full autonomy,” he added. “No one’s in the machine.”
It’s been three years since John Deere unveiled its first autonomous tractor. Commercial deliveries began in 2022, and now Hindman says that many farms have put the company’s robot equipment to work. “Those tractors are already being used by farmers to prepare the soil for planting in the next year,” he said.
Now the company is doubling down on autonomy, at a time when other vehicle manufacturers are cutting their losses. John Deere says its autonomous machines can help farmers address labor shortages, while also meeting the growing demand for food, infrastructure, and housing.
Tractor or computer?
The company’s second-generation tractor is designed for large-scale agricultural operations. And in order to ensure a full, 360-degree view of the world, John Deere added 16 cameras all around the cab of the tractor that provide for triple overlapping feeds.
The images are then sent for processing to an onboard Nvidia GPU because John Deere wanted to be sure the tractor’s edge AI system was doing all of its predictions and planning on the vehicle itself, and not up in the cloud.
“This ensures that the machine is running safe and reliable,” said Willy Pell, CEO of John Deere subsidiary Blue River Technology, which designs machine learning systems for agricultural operations.
John Deere’s first-generation tractors were designed specifically for the slowest and easiest works, which is fall tillage with a chisel file. The second-generation system will be for a broader set of operations, with John Deere setting the goal for a fully autonomous farming system for corn and soybeans in the US by 2030.
Dusty the dump truck
John Deere’s next robot vehicle is the company’s first for construction sites: an articulated dump truck (ADT). The heavy-duty truck is 34 feet long, 12 feet tall, and can carry over 92,000 pounds of construction materials — the equivalent of seven African elephants — in its front bucket. John Deere’s executives have given it the nickname “Dusty.”
The job of a dump truck operator in quarries and other sites is tough but also repetitive and boring. By removing the driver, John Deere hopes to improve safety while also helping improve productivity.
The ADT operates using the same tech stack as its farming siblings, with the added ability to dynamically change its routing information to get around people and other vehicles on narrow roads through construction sites. The truck can also receive directions from remote operators about location and timing — but that doesn’t make it remote-controlled.
“It’s unsupervised, it’s capable of making decisions and operating safely on its own,” said Maya Sripadam, senior product manager at Blue River Technology. “So it’s segmenting the world into different classes, it’s using StarFire GPS to localize itself on the road, and it’s navigating between a load zone and a haul zone.”
In the orchard
John Deere also revealed another autonomous tractor, this one designed to run on diesel for pulling air blast sprayers through nut orchards. Sprayers are used to apply pesticides, growth regulators, and nutrients to ensure a healthy crop.
Nuts are a huge business in the US, especially in California. And with 80 percent of the world’s almond crop grown in the Golden State, labor shortages have proven to be a perennial problem.
Workers typically drive up and down endless rows of orchards up to 10 hours a day at 2.5 mph. Every single tree needs to be sprayed six to eight times per year, with work starting in February and going through July or August — right into the hottest times of the year.
“The work is exhausting and it’s repetitive,” said Igino Cafiero, director of High Value Crop Autonomy, “but it’s also absolutely essential to protect the trees from pests and disease.”
But nut orchards, with their dense canopies of trees, are a much different environment than corn or soybean fields. John Deere had to add lidar laser sensors to help improve the tractor’s sensing and guidance capabilities because GPS is often obstructed. Aside from that, the tractor uses the same second-generation technology stack as its tractors for field tillage.
Robo-scaping
The last machine John Deere revealed was an autonomous lawn mower for large-scale commercial landscaping jobs.
The all-electric mower features four pairs of stereo cameras, one in the front, one in the back, and one on each side. They’re positioned as high as possible on the machine to give a complete 360-degree view around the mower. That’s fewer cameras than the tractor or dump truck, but enough for the size of the machine.
A large office park or campus yard is very similar to a field or construction, in that it’s a “constrained environment” with much less chance for unpredictable behavior, Blue River’s Pell said.
“The use cases we have, the tech just really fits these environments so well,” he added. “And it’s combined with this deep customer pain around labor availability and quality that just makes all this the perfect time for everything.”
John Deere didn’t announce pricing for any of its autonomous vehicles, but past reports have noted that the premium over non-robotic equipment would be “significant” — perhaps as much as 10 percent. A regular 8R tractor and the 2430 chisel plow can cost as much as $500,000, which suggests an added $50,000 for an autonomous version.
That could irk some farmers, especially those at odds with John Deere over the company’s recalcitrance over self-repairs. The Federal Trade Commission is currently investigating whether John Deere used unfair practices related to the repair of its agricultural equipment.
“Pricing will vary based on specific products and configurations and will be shared at a later date,” John Deere spokesperson Diego Rivera said.
