On January 4, 2022, at CES in Las Vegas, John Deere revealed what it called a fully autonomous tractor ready for large-scale production. The machine combined Deere’s 8R tractor, a TruSet-enabled chisel plow, GPS guidance, and a new set of perception technologies, and the company said it would be available to farmers later that year.
The tractor carries six pairs of stereo cameras that give it 360-degree obstacle detection and let it calculate distance. According to Deere, images from those cameras are passed through a deep neural network “that classifies each pixel in approximately 100 milliseconds” and decides whether the machine keeps moving or stops if it detects an obstacle. The tractor also continuously checks its position against a geofence, staying within less than an inch of accuracy.
To run it, a farmer transports the machine to a field, configures it for autonomous operation, and starts it by swiping left to right in the John Deere Operations Center Mobile app. The farmer can then leave the field and monitor the tractor’s status, job quality and machine health from a phone, adjusting speed and depth remotely.
The reveal marked a shift for a 185-year-old equipment maker into shipping a self-driving product, framed around a labor shortage in agriculture and a need to do more field work in narrow weather windows. It built on Deere’s 2017 acquisition of the machine-vision startup Blue River Technology, whose deep-learning work also underpins the company’s See and Spray weed-targeting system.