American engineering company Deere & The company, commonly known as John Deere, presented an unmanned tractor of its own design at CES 2022. The drone is built on the basis of John Deere 8R and the company plans to start selling the serial version in 2022. This is reported by Electrek.
Automation of agriculture is a promising direction for the development of unmanned technologies, which is markedly different from passenger or cargo unmanned vehicles. On the one hand, unmanned tractors and combines do not need to be able to move on public roads, which simplifies the task and allows you to do with fewer sensors. On the other hand, depending on the tasks to be solved (for example, to destroy weeds with a laser), new engineering solutions and specific recognition algorithms may be needed.
Since autonomous agricultural machinery can work around the clock and almost without interruption, both individual enthusiasts and companies around the world, including in Russia, are interested in this topic — Cognitive Technologies, which has experimented with tractors and combines, is doing this here.
The American company John Deere, one of the largest manufacturers of agricultural equipment, is also developing unmanned vehicles and showed an unmanned tractor back in 2019, but then it was a prototype . Now the company has introduced a production version based on the John Deere 8R.
The unmanned tractor is equipped with a GPS module and six stereo cameras for panoramic viewing and obstacle recognition. A tractor equipped with a chisel plow is launched from a mobile device and does not require the presence of a farmer in the field — the owner can also track the work and receive information from cameras from a tablet or smartphone.
Several unmanned tractors are already working in the fields, and later this year John Deere will start selling to everyone. The price of the tractor has not yet been disclosed.
Automation of agricultural work is not limited to tractors and combines. A few years ago, the British research project Hands Free Hectare demonstrated on the example of one hectare that robots are able to sow a plot and harvest from it almost without human intervention.
Nikolai Vorontsov
